Thread Painted Portrait of Bess

This is our beautiful Bess (part Labrador, Retriever, Huntaway and Samoyed!) who turns nine in February and has been with us for eight and a half years after we adopted her from the SPCA.

In October 2018 I attended a two-day thread painting workshop in Winton, with tutor Sonya Prchal, hosted by the Otautau Patchwork group. After our New Year holiday I took a day to finally 'frame' the picture up as a wall-hanging.

I really enjoyed learning the technique of thread painting (basically using free-motion stitching to 'colour in' a pre-printed photo) - it was really fun to do and so exciting to see how effective it looks!

We started with our photo printed onto fabric. Sonya guided us through the stages of thread colour selection, use of the free motion, where to start, where to move to next etc. Here are some progress photos...

After printing our photos Sonya had worked out some of the main colours we would need for thread and instructed us to buy those; thankfully she had her own collection of a huge range of colours for us to make use of for the areas where we only needed small amounts of the colours.

After all the stitching was done Sonya helped us to use some fabric colouring pencils to add depth or shading as well.

Original stitching 6x8" and final wallhanging 16x12.5"

Here is a photo of the work of some of the other workshop ladies - their quilt group holds an annual exhibition (photo via Sonya's Facebook page):

 

Happy summer hello to anyone visiting me via Kelly's Needle and Thread Thursday linky party!