I spend such a lot of time on my sewing machine that every once in a while I like to keep my hand in with some good old hand stitching.
This project is to learn how to put a random suggestion of water colour or acrylic paint down on to fabric to suggest a background scene which will be embellished or further stitched with traditional hand embroidery to bring-it to life.
It’s quite liberating to have the freedom to splash Paint on to a surface when you only have a vague idea of what you want to achieve, having said that it does give you a fairly open scope to play and grow the picture as you sew.
I wasn’t sure how to go about it so I started with a plain white piece of fabric and lightly traced a basic window, bricks and a hanging basket in place. This gave me the areas I needed to consider for specific colours and the rest-of the area was then just a wash of these same colours.
I then spent a pleasant couple of evenings using simple stitches such as French knots, stem stitch, back stitch, straight stitch, chain stitch and several others to enhance area like the individual bricks, the hanging basket and adding a grassy border to bring the paint and the embroidery together.