More Thread Work - Design Wall Monday

With house guests coming, I spent most of last week giving this ole Victorian a good clean.  Love having friends for the weekend, but I would be lying if I said I wasn't ecstatic glad to sit down to 5 hours of thread work on the Jinny Beyer challenge on Sunday afternoon.  It always amazes me how much time the thread work  on a piece takes.  I think that maybe its because there is no specific way to do it - no technique out there that is the norm.  Thread work or thread painting is definitely in the hands of the quilter.   Because of that, I thought I would show you some of the ways I do it.

Usually when I have a project like this, I have a tendency to make little drawing in my sketchbook, testing out how lines will look on the motif of my quilt.  It seems to help and its a lot easier to erase pencils than to take out a lot of thread work.

Of course with this project, its all about the rocks.  But gosh. . . . how do you thread paint a rock??   The thing about adding free motion thread is to remember that you are applying  line and texture.  So you have to think that the direction of the line will lead the viewers' eye somewhere, along with adding texture to the piece.  I mean - geesh - if we didn't want to add texture to  our pieces, we would all be watercolorists (grin)!  When I worked on the rocks, then, I made each a little different - just like rocks.  I did anchor the edges down with a scribble stitch - rather than a satin. I don't like satin stitching unless I'm doing something that is VERY graphic.

With the rocks done, I was left with the cave and the foreground.  I wanted the inside of the cave to have more texture since it was appearing a bit flat to my eye - but also wanted for it to remain nice and dark.  The dark value helped it recede to the background.  I'm still not quite sure if putting all that movement in that section was the right thing to do - but its done now (grin).  That's the thing about thread work - in the final analysis you just have to step out and go with your gut.  Sometimes its just right - other times - not so much.

As you can see, I'm not quite done with it - almost though.  Had to stop when my eyes started blurring.  I should finish this up in the next day or two and get after some other projects.  Our local fair is in 5 weeks and it would be nice if I had something to show!

p.s. - Hint of the day - the way to build a nice thread collection is every time its on sale online or at Joann's buy just  a few spools.  Sooner or later, you have boxes and boxes and all the colors you need!

See more great design walls at Judy's Patchworks!