I was excited to take the Drawing with Thread workshop taught by my friend Amanda Wood at Collage Collage last weekend. She is a textile artist working in weaving and stitching, and I was curious to see what I could take away to apply to my recent stitch and embroidery explorations.

Collage supplies at Collage Collage

Linen painting with fabric paint

We started things off with a warm up exercise working with collage and colour, and then transitioned into our stitching projects by creating a base to work with. Using fabric inks we painted pieces of linen, and I chose crazy bright colours. I am not a good painter, and was not happy where I ended up with the painted surface but I wasn’t going to worry about it in a workshop where I’m suppose to play and explore.

Amanda brought piles of beautiful thread for us to use, and it became really hard to choose colours to work with. She did a quick demo of different types of stitches to try and then gave us time to work. I did a bunch of french knots as a warm up, and then explored the seed stitch. It is now a new favourite of mine.

Stitching demo by Amanda Wood

The piece above is what I was able to accomplish by the end of class. I like the piece so much more than I thought I would because of the mark making of the stitches. I plan to work on this a bit more over time and see where it ends up.