In October 2006, Louise Gardiner presented a work shop about using the sewing machine for embroidery. You can find her website here.
We did a drawing exercise first of all. It was designed to relax us. Louise put some music on and we closed our eyes and doodled to it. We didn’t take the pen off the paper and we were encouraged to make different types of mark making. We did this a couple of times, to different types of music.
We then took a heavy piece of canvas and used our sewing machines with black thread to stitch a frame. We used different stitches based on the different marks we had made when doing our relaxing drawing.
Next, we all sat in a circle and drew the person opposite us. This was a bit stressful for the non-drawers in the group. Next, we drew the person again, but this time without taking the pen off the paper or looking at the paper. These images were much more interesting than the ones we had done whilst looking at the paper. We did this a second time.
We chose one of the last two drawings to use as a basis of our embroidery. The picture was placed on the back of the canvas fabric and we stitched one the lines we had drawn. When we were ready, we turned it over and embellished. We were also encouraged to add words to our creation.
