This week at creative textiles, we had a morning workshop preparing a silk painting for stitching. This beautiful sample was created by Rhonda for us to follow.
The background was painted first. Rhonda has left the sky area unstitched, which I think works really well. We're all doing the same landscape design so it's easier to keep control of us, LOL!
[Click to enlarge so you can see the stitches.]
foreground grasses and flowers
To begin, we did a practise piece on cotton fabric using Genesis paints. Oops, I was working from another sample and forgot to leave a space at the top left of the yellow/dried grass section.
cotton fabric, stretched and painted
Once that was dry, we started on the silk - first drawing the basic landscape design and using a resist over the pencil lines so the paint didn't bleed into an adjoining area.
silk, showing resist lines
The paint was mixed, watered down and applied, then dried with hairdryers in between each colour. It can be a bit tricky to ensure that the paint doesn't run through the resist - thankfully, I didn't have any problems.
The paint behaves very differently between cotton and silk, but this background will be hidden - it's just a guide for thread colours.
At home I pressed it with a warm iron to heat seal and now it's ready to stitch. Next week we begin ... hope I can wait that long!
