Wednesday, April 18, 2012

Weekend of Leaf Collaging

So a 3 day class with Terry Dryden. Color me impressed! She's an excellent teacher. Well-prepared with impressive materials. Great pacing. Nearly an effortless learning experience. By which I mean, I came away from the class with a lot of knowledge without any suffering. 

Here's the piece of canvas we start with. The lines are pre-drawn and the transfers are in place. And the first thing we need to do is color parts of our canvas with Copic markers. You can see my first areas colored and I marked the rest to be colored with little marker dots.
 
Moving along with the coloring. We used three different colors for a total of six layers to get the effect we wanted. Because we all chose differing orders of application, no two canvases in class look exactly the same. 

This photo shows my piece with three layers done. 
 
Okay. I'm finished coloring except for the odd thread or two that I go back to later. 
 
What happens if you color in the wrong place? Not to worry. We'll be stitching over that later and we find out it doesn't show at all! Good thing. (Canvas belongs to Anonymous!)
 

Somehow my end of Day 1 photo disappeared while transferring to the computer. Here's my progress at the end of Day 2. We stitched and also practiced transferring another design to canvas. Hey, we get a bonus piece!
 
At the end of Day 3 this is where we are. We've stitched the gingko leaves in the middle box - a frightening prospect for some canvas workers whose surface embroidery days are back in the dark ages. But we all managed to make good progress and be happy with our results. 

 
Confession time. This piece is right up my alley color wise. I'm totally enamored. I'm afraid it's jumping to the top of the rotation list because I'm not going to be able to resist it. 

Thank you, Terry! I had a wonderful time. Learned a lot. And will have something beautiful to show for this experience. 

4 comments:

Ann said...

Love the colors--can't wait to see the progress on it!

Unknown said...

Beautiful! I love those colors too. (I have a scarf that would match.) I can't wait to see your progress on this.

What color is the variegated floss that you're using around the oak leaves?

Donna said...

If you're asking about the two oak leaves in the upper right hand corner, that would be Glorianna's Bluegrass. These kits have an absolutely beautiful version of this thread. I like it so much, I think I have purchased it 3 times so far with no idea of what to do with it.

Sara Leigh said...

Your dangly threads are bundled much more neatly than mine are. Hahahahaha. I may have to bring this to stitch tonight. I've been contemplating it. Honestly, I wasn't wild about this piece until we got into the class and I saw it in real life. Its photos just don't do it justice! I love the colors.