'Using a Photographic Image as a Basis of a Stitched Piece' - day school with Andrea McMillan

 Andrea brought along a large selection of her beautiful art quilts to inspire us to use a photo as a basis for a quilt or wall hanging. She provided photo of a sea stack on a beach (the first picture below), which we used to make a small A5 sample or her technique.

The technique involved tracing the image, transferring it to paper, and then making a collage with tissue paper (second pic), in order to see the areas of the photo as 'blocks' of colour, enhanced with coloured pencil, and not get bogged down into detail. We then traced the blocks onto Bondaweb, which we adhered onto fabric scraps according to our colour scheme. Everyone's was different, even though the picture source was the same. It's always fun choosing a fabric to portray a piece of beach, say, and seeing the choices everyone makes from the fabric stash. Using more bits of fabric to add detail means less stitching, or we could keep the larger pieces to fabric patches and do more stitching, so it will be exciting to see the end results of everyone's choices.

We all had our pieces more or less glued down, ready to take home and finish at our leisure. It was very interesting learning a new technique.

Sally went 'off piste' and is doing her dog on the beach. I did too, but haven’t got round to cutting out yet.