Bluebell Wood

What a thoroughly wonderful time I had at Alison Holt’s freehand machine embroidery course last week.  It was a splendid three days of learning new techniques – silk painting and machine embroidery – surrounded by other likeminded ladies.  Alison’s tuition was informative, engaging and entertaining and she was always on hand to offer advice and help should one need it.

Upon arriving at Alison’s beautiful studio in her back garden, I unpacked my many belongings, sharing a table with Gail and Liz.  We immediately started nattering and didn’t really stop!  The first demo was Alison showing us how to transfer a design onto the silk in readiness for painting.

After carefully selecting a suitable picture to copy, I set about tracing the bare bones of the image and then using that tracing to transfer the design to my silk.

The lines are defined using gutta, which is a resist and forms a physical barrier to stop the silk paints running into each other.  My gutta lines were a bit chunky but I was assured that it would all be sorted once we started stitching!

After choosing a variety of threads in many tones, the stitching could begin.  The embroidery is worked from the back forwards so Alison did another demo showing us how to do distant tree trunks and foliage.  I’d got a bit over enthusiastic with my gutta and had forgotten to leave a gap where my foreground trees were going to be.

Following another demo where Alison showed how to do distant bluebells explaining stitch length and how to blend the threads, the next wave of stitching went it.

Once I’d got to the bottom of my first line of foreground trees, I stopped the bluebells and then worked on the trees – after another fascinating tutorial explaining different ways of creating textured bark.

This process then continued, being guided by my painting and the original picture, swapping threads and using different stitch lengths to get the perspective right.

The tricky thing is knowing when to stop and not overworking the piece.  I think I was a little guilty of that and I learned a whole raft of things that I would consider when doing my next project.  This is my finished piece together with the photo that inspired it.

Overall, I was chuffed with the result and it’s now mounted and framed and hanging up in the lounge.

I enjoyed the course so much that I’ve booked myself on the next one which is Seascapes.   Well, living at the coast, how could I not?!