I seem to have lost my drawing mojo and found my sewing one instead lately. My dear friend Luba gave me a stash of her dress design samples recently and I've been thinking of a way to make use of them. Thanks to a beautiful birthday book from my sister about a textile artist who makes landscape patchworks I soon came up with a plan.
Ever since visiting Roussillon in Provence with it's ochre cliffs I've wanted to find a new way of depicting the wonderful colours of the landscape. I chose this photo out of the hundreds I have on the computer and printed it off to copy.
The first job was to have a good rummage through the scraps and select the colours I wanted to use. I found a nice piece of plain white linen to use as a base and started to build up the picture with some blue for the sky, grey for the distant hills and lots of reds, yellows and oranges for the cliffs.
I worked across the picture, adding green scraps for the trees and stitching the trunks with zigzag stitches to build up the texture of the bark. I did a lot of random stitching over the rock and cliff parts to try and add texture and interest.
The light trees in the foreground are made from organdie coloured with watersoluble crayons and then stitched to give that delicate leafy effect.
Finally I did a load more random stitching all over the picture and also frayed some of the fabric edges to depict the grassy areas along the cliff tops. Once the picture was finished I had to decide what to do with it and I had a brainwave, why not a cushion cover? So it was back to the fabric box and a nice big piece of green fabric was a perfect blend for the greens in the picture. I edged it with more of the green patchwork fabric I used for the trees and as you can see at the top of the post it's on the sofa and looking good!
I am really pleased with this first effort at needlepainting and I am sure I will be doing more in the future.
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