I haven’t been crafting much, favoring video games and reading instead as I often do in winter, but I did sign up and complete TextileArtist.org‘s 2023 Stitch Camp with Gwen Hedley. I was hoping it would light my creative mojo, but I’m back at Elden Ring instead, wah wah.

Gwen walked us through the process in small chunks over the course of five days. The first task we were to do was collect our things in three colors, a light, medium, and dark. We needed fabrics (though didn’t use them explicitly), threads, and paints in these hues. I did include a salmony-coral color, but worked against using mints and beiges to the best of my ability. I wanted to stretch out of my comfort zone. You can see how far I got;)

The second task was to paint our base fabric (which I had dyed). I won’t get into Gwen’s details here, but you can see my results. I most definitely did not love them. But Gwen assured us that meant nothing at this time so I proceeded ever onward.

Then, we were sent to chop them up. I used a small business card as my template. I had no idea what shape I’d be making, nor how many I’d include yet. It all depended on what I decided to keep, and how much time I wanted to fiddle with the project.

The next task was to sort that out, and originally I selected four pieces to look something like this:

In the end, I added a fifth and decided to hang it vertically. This let me feel like the stars were falling from a greenish astronomical cloud, through a purply cloud of astronomical bits.

I added a wee bit of bling: some blue-green star sequins and tiny shell sequins. I tried to do a better job telling a story than with my Tume beadwork, though with things kind of just floating around in the chaos of space, I’m not too sure about that story actually, ha!

At first, I thought it would be impossible to blend the pieces of painted cloth together, but truly the process became transformational. Even up close, it can be difficult to see the edges of each rectangle. To finish, I used a glittery ribbon, but the dark side of it overpowered the rest, so instead I simply folded it at the corners so as to have a two-toned effect.

Thanks, Gwen and Stitch Club!

TextileArtist.org’s Stitch Club, as you might recall, began as a free outreach in the depth of Covid in 2020. With its success, they created a paid membership platform, so I’m happy to say I’m a “founding member” in that regard. During the last two years, they run Stitch Camp, which is meant to be a taste of the type of workshops we do, and only once Camp is over are new users allowed to sign up. Registration isn’t rolling, for what I can imagine are many reasons. If you’d like to get in while you still can, registration is open until January 27th, 11:59pm UK time.