Now well past the halfway mark in the SAQA 100 Day challenge, I’m on schedule, sometimes a day or two behind but more often a day or two ahead of the calendar. These next two are of fabric with holes cut, stitchery added, and the work placed over a contrasting background and mounted over a 3.25sq. inches foam core background.

In the last couple of weeks I’ve been doing a Stitch Club workshop with Shelley Rhodes http://www.shelleyrhodes.co.uk/ which had us observing a landscape by walking it and recording it’s lines and shapes via various kinds of markings, paint and stitch onto a strip of fabric ~1.5m long. I chose to use the many photos of interesting lines, shapes and textures I’ve taken of our local beach over many years of walking along it. Instead of recording segments of the landscape on the long strip, I did several shorter segments and even cut one into 2 pieces.

One of my favourite beach texture photos, which I observed only one time several years ago. These ‘cliffs’ are actually only about 3cm-5cm high, not huge cliffs across a vast desert! And the waving lines are the trails left by tiny little bivalves in the wet sand as they followed the receding tide back down the beach.

On each of these tiny landscapes I resorted to free machine stitchery to enhance my markings, as by the time I’d finished painting several layers onto the fabric it was just too stiff for me to hand stitch through. Learning by doing, though, as ever, as I now know to use water diluted paint next time…