Busy Bee

Last weekend I took myself off to Dorset for a weekend workshop with Katy Rundle to create a bumble bee painting with fabric and thread.  Katy creates amazing things with fabric and thread – check out her website here, where you can also book her workshops.  Whilst I have done a reasonable amount of free-motion embroidery now, I’ve never really done appliqué so this was a great opportunity to learn a new skill.  And who doesn’t love creating bees?

Katy had drawn the bee on calico fabric to get us started so our first job was to apply fusible glue to the back of the decorative fabric pieces.  I’d normally use Bondaweb but I’d had trouble getting hold of any so I tried out a new brand called Quiltlines Superweb which did the same job.

Then it was just a case of cutting out shapes from the fabrics and positioning them on the drawing.  I was trying to do what I’d do in my drawings to try to get the tonal values right, even though I wasn’t using conventional bee colours.  Another point that Katy taught was to try to use the pattern in the fabric, for example, to mimic the direction of the fur.

Once I was happy with everything, the whole lot was pressed with a hot iron to adhere all those little bits of fabric in place.

After cutting out the bee, it was attached to my backing fabric and the embroidery began.  I enjoyed this part and definitely over-stitched my bee as some of my fabrics are rather obliterated!  The idea is that you can still see the patterns of the fabric that were carefully placed in the first stage.

My bee looked a bit lost so Katy suggested putting some wiggly lines in to ground it, which worked really well, although they were a bit of a sod to sew!

I had thought the piece was finished.  I propped it up and kept walking past it for a few days and decided that the wing looked unfinished.  I didn’t want to sew over the fabric as I’d deliberately used fabrics with bees and the names of herbs that bees pollinate on there.  So, I decided to overlay the wing with organza to give the wing that iridescent sheen but you can still see the writing.  I bought the wrong size tray frame to mount it but you get the idea.