The Difference A Few Stitches Make...

A while back I showed you this new piece I started. Today I wanted to share with you the difference that a few hand stitches make in finishing off this row of fused squared.

I hadn't thought to do this post until I had already completed some of it, so it's not a true before and after, but you can see just how much more interest and texture the contrasting stitching gives to those squares and rectangles. (The colour in the top shot is truer to the actual piece...the two other shots are too green/lime)

I haven't touched this piece for a couple of weeks, but I do plan to work on it more once I'm up at the cottage.  It'll be a great piece to stitch away at and I won't have to bring along a whole truck load of supplies! My thought for this summer is to have a lot of hand work ready to work on so I can leave my sewing machine and fabric stash at home and limit my art packing to a couple of bags containing fibre art needing stitch and some very basic art journalling supplies (journal, Koi watercolour set, and a couple of black and white pens).

Fun Found Items...

The other day I was going through some things and I found a bag of goodies that my friend Jan gave me at a Christmas get together.  Inside was this package of Scratch to Draw paper.







I reached for my high tech tweezers, usually reserved for fine manipulation of tiny things...but they were the first pointy item I got my hands on and I knew they'd be great for scratching into the paper (they stick mentioned on the package seems to have gone missing!).


I used Carolyn Dube's buildings stencil because it has a nice variety of interesting blocks. I was thrilled with the bright colour and the effect of the tweezers scratching into the black looked great (in my humble opinion LOL).

 I made a variety of different sized 'building blocks' :o) and then stacked them in a finely balanced arrangement.  I played with various background ideas, but in the end I decided that I liked the contrast of the blocks on the white page so I left it as is.


I added some text, a bit of shading and a simple doodled border and called it done!