Stitching, Stitching

Here's the other thing I worked on this week - my March Take It Further Challenge. Yes, March... I'm trying to shade my fabric with thread painting to create the detail of bark and moss on these tree trunks, and it has not gone as I anticipated. After hours and hours of stitching back and forth on this thing, I needed to give it a huge break after adding the white thread - see detail picture below. (This was the one color I'd been avoiding because I thought it too stark, but which turned out to be just what I needed to bring out some highlights.) My session this week was to start adding moss.

One reason I let it sit was that I was contemplating how to render the moss. With green velvet? (I thought I had some in my scraps, but couldn't find it.) With more thread lace like the lichen? (Because I'd need so much, I wasn't thrilled about that idea.). I finally went to Ben Franklin to see if they had some fake moss I could stitch in place. I found something on a fine wire base and brought it home, but I couldn't bring myself to use it. Not only would it create too much dimension compared to the rest of the quilt, I found the green mossy bits shed off the wire quite easily. I returned to Ann Fahl's book for inspiration and found it. No more straight line thread painting, but tiny circle thread painting. This is a bit like the garnet quilting stitch (see this post for an example), except the circles are quite small and filled in with stitching. The motion is a bit like the thread lace motion, but for some reason, I'm tolerating it better done directly on the fabric.

Ann warns that this will take quite some time to do, and she's right, but you know me - I soldier on no matter how long something takes if it gives me the results I'm looking for.