At Embroiderers Guild the first Saturday in July we had an all-day workshop led by Joy and Pam. The idea was to use gesso and/or modelling paste on calico to create surfaces for stitch. It was a nice versatile and quick technique, so I came home with quite a few samples, all white paste on natural calico background. All the samples were quite small and different odd shapes.
I was a bit underwhelmed by them to be honest. However, there was a little voice at the back of my mind saying ‘Just carry on, at least they can’t get worse’. So firstly I made them all into rectangles of different widths but the same height. That at least satisfied my need for order! Then I painted them with acrylic, even added transfer foil or painted bondaweb to a few and tidied the edges with a zigzag on the machine.
Enthusiasm having returned a bit, I then doodled on each with a bit of stitch. By this stage I was getting to quite like them, thought they could make nice teaching samples, but how to present them? The final flourish was to stitch them together into a zigzag ‘book’. I am really pleased with the result and will post up some of the individual ‘pages’ in future posts, but for now here is the completed book.
It just shows that sometimes it is worth persevering even when you aren’t feeling particularly inspired. 
hilstitch 