The fourth of each month being a catch-up week, the next workshop is one on the expressive straight stitch by Emily Tull, UK, a prominent textile artist particularly known for her stitched portraits of people and studies of animal and bird life. Her stitching is simple and being mostly arrangements of straight stitches, often layered in linear marks, looking very like drawings, but done with needle and fine thread.

The assignment is to use straight stitches in 4 tones of one colour to embroider mouths or lips in several expressions, I’m going with her suggestion that we take pics of our own lips with various expressions and stitch three of them, so uninspiring as I think my own lips are (I’m sure everyone says that) these are expressions that Mike says are typical:

I will be starting to do the stitching today – maybe finish it. A decision has to be made whether to stitch in tones of grey black and white, or in white plus vivid oranges from medium to dark on black, perhaps.

Straight stitch of course is the basis of so many other more complicated stitches and patterns in embroidery, but used just on its own there are so many ways it can express a stitcher’s creative ideas. In 2013 I blogged on “The Glorious Straight Stitch”, https://www.alisonschwabe.com/weblog/?p=2409 where I mentioned a book that enthralled me when I found it (1977) soon after beng drawn to the creative potential of stitchery. Emily’s work reminds me of that book featuring the abstract work in stitch of Nik Krevitsky