Finally, let's pretty up that landscape.
Here is our landscape as we left it, above. I am going to show you a couple of flower embellishments to put in the foreground at the front. First we are going to do some tall, lavender-like or delphinium stems. I will show you a few ways to do these first.
Here are two ways to add leaves (above), on the left, a simple fern stitch and on the right, leaf shapes, which you can leave unfilled, or fill in. You actually need to add the leaves after, but I am showing you the shapes here because they apply to all three flower stitches. Remember that the picture above is a 10x magnification at least. At a normal magnification, they will not look as rough.
The first flower stitch can use granite stitch, or circles with straight stitch to make flowers on a long stem (left, above), then put the leaves in (right).
The second way to make these flowers is to use a fern stitch, then add the leaves. On the left, I have gone over the flowers twice to show you that if you want more colour, you can.
Another way to add more colour, is to make the fern/flowers, using a narrow zig zag. Above is a sequence diagram showing how these are made.
The left sample uses the leaf shapes, on the right fern leaves. I will make the first layer using the first two alternatives.
Below shows these two steps on the landscape. First the flowers, then the leaves.
This layer might seem very pale, however, it is simply a background to the final layer and so I do not want and very vivid colours that will draw the eye. Also, you can see my travelling stitches between the flower stems. These will be covered up by the next layer. If all I was going to put were these flowers, I would make them brighter and I would have gone off the edge with the stems.
For the final layer, I am going to put some organza poppies and above you can see some triangular scraps of green stitched down. Since these pieces were actually only half a centimetre in width at the wide part, you can work out that they are fiddly. Use a bamboo skewer to hold them stable whilst you stitch. At the top right, you can see my mistake - using too light a thread, and the left top is what happens when you don't hold the fabric down. At the bottom is a "leaf" secured correctly. The organza will fray but I like the frayed edge. If you don't, then you can use felt, or burn the edges which I will show you in a technique lesson soon. The leaves and the poppies themselves are not accurate. They do not need to be - They are only an impression.
Above, you can see the green scraps secured randomly over the first layer of flowers.
Above you can see how the poppies are constructed. At the top is a small scrap secured with a granite stitch to represent a bud, and below it a circle of fabric is folded in half and secured to represent a side view. The bottom two poppies are secured with a granite stitch in black in the centre to represent the stamens. The top flower is one layer, below it is two layers.
Here are the main poppies sprinkled over the foreground.
Next, I added a few side views and buds, then finally a few more leaves over the top.
The foreground gives the landscape a vivid focus and as you can see, the two flowers do not fight for attention.
If you are very observant, you will notice on comparing this final framed version with the one at the beginning of the lesson, I have used a larger mat board, and extended the bottom of the picture by adding more grass and poppy leaves. I decided that the sky was too limited in the smaller frame, but that I needed a bit more on the bottom to fit in the next frame.
In these lessons we have learned a few basic techniques in thread painting to create a simple landscape. Make one as a post card for your next swap, or as a gift. This one is to be a postcard and is going to the USA as a gift in
Craft it Forward. Hope you like it Diana!
My next set of Thread Painting lessons will be a pictorial sampler to accompany the stitch lessons I post each Saturday.
Art begins as an experiment and ends as an experience.
