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.