Jan Dowson workshop at Seata

Last Saturday we had a long awaited Hand Stitched Landscape workshop with Jan Dowson. On Saturday morning, I was still undecided about what to do, busily scrolling through my thousands of photos. For all the photos that I take, I don’t take many landscapes (or people). Most are details or macro / micro of flowers, fungi, stitching / textiles, work in progress. I narrowed it down and printed half a dozen and madly gathered scraps in the right colours.

We all gathered round at the front for a brief look at some of Jan’s work and techniques, and listened to instructions and the plan for the day. Jan handed out large sheets of heavy paper, goody bags with written instructions, a selection of scraps to add to our own and a pattern for a little bird.

We had to simplify our chosen landscape, a sunset over Scunthorpe steelworks.

Jan walked around, looking at our ideas and drawings, and making suggestions. When she saw my photo of sheep at Brampton Banks, near Hadrian’s Wall in Northumberland, she thought it lent itself to the technique better than the steelworks photo. It has more obvious horizontal lines, and would be easier to do for a first piece.

So I did a few quick sketches. The photo was taken further down the line, I’d got so involved with starting that I forgot to take photos until much later in the day.

Here are my scraps and Jan’s, mixed together as I started making choices.

This was much further on. I’d originally ignored the sheep, and started tacking down when Jan came round on another circuit, and said she had some printed sheep fabric I could use. I wasn’t convinced at first, thinking it would look rather twee, but cut out the smallest group of four, and then the two slightly larger ones for the foreground. I must say I was surprised: it brought the whole thing to life, and the scale worked. It now needs stitching. I’d just about got it all tacked down when it was time to stop for lunch.

The plan for the afternoon was to use scraps to form the little bird, and then stitch on feathers. I used a variegated perlé. He still needs legs and the eye stitching down, and I’m not sure if the eye placing is quite right, but the design of the silk scrap for the head has a centre where it fitted (see the photo above, with the paper bird pattern, in the yellow and blue piece). As always the day passed really quickly, and soon it was time to look at what everyone else had done and then pack up.

I also remembered to take my copy of Jan’s book and got her to sign it for me. Thank you Jan, and for a lovely day.

There’s a lot more slow stitching to go, but it’s something that can be picked up and worked on, now the main decisions have been made.

Windows to the soul

The theme for travelling book (pages) this month was ‘Windows’, so plenty of scope there. My second travelling book’s whole theme was ‘Stained glass windows’, and some wonderful work went into it, with lots of ideas for further development.

But no, what popped straight into my head were eyes, the windows to the soul. On several occasions I’ve tried to take some really close-up photos of eyes, without much success; particulary bad were the first selfies, trying to take my own eye.

I’ve tried the phone and the iPad, tried my own eyes, Colin’s, Miles’ and Lera’s, got Colin to try mine, all to no avail. Alex tried last week for me (better), but too many reflections – next door’s house and garage and the window frame.

Then I tried with the macro setting on the bridge camera, me taking Colin’s eye.

And Colin took mine, but far too many wrinkles. I’m not used to seeing myself so close-up.

However, once they were cropped I’d got something to work with.

So far, I’ve done my own eye, because there’s more variation in colours to play with.

I’d originally thought about doing silk shading, and doing several. Then I decided that one bigger iris would be better on the A5-size page. It’s 7cm (3 1/4 inches) in diameter, so it meant a lot of stitching and not a huge amount of time.

I thought it was a good idea to put some background colour in first. I started working with the soft cotton, really tight in a small frame, and dampened Derwent Inktense pencils, making radiating lines between the inner and outer circles, adding more and more colours.

I used a charcoal grey for the pupil, leaving a tiny bit of the white fabric showing.

Then I strengthened the colour around the outer edge of the iris.

I was really pleased with the finished result, but thought I’d better put some stitches in, from a selection of possible threads (but not the reds and corals, of course!).

I did straight stitches of varying lengths, echoing the pencil marks radiating outwards in three or four different shades of green and greeny blue.

Then I did varying length stitches around the outer and inner edge of the iris. The yellow is a subtly variegating slightly thicker thread with a few green stitches mingled.

I now need to stretch it over some mount-board, do some print-outs of photos of work in progress and a colour-chart of the pencils….. and today, so I’m not last minute again tomorrow morning!