Thread Painting Workshop - Birds

We'll we did it again.
The ladies who participated in the Tree workshop of last October ( Post Workshop Reflections, October) expressed an interest in learning how to Thread Paint Birds. I had given each a chickadee for their panel. Now they made their own.

I decided to start with a chickadee because it's simple and the divisions are clear with minimal blending required.
After starting with a small exercise in how to blend two contrasting colours together, I had the ladies do another small exercise, filling a circle with thread to show the contour lines of a sphere.
After looking at the problems and pitfalls, they were ready to start.

I'm a great believer in keeping it really simple, so after tracing and coloring a Chickadee from a photo copy onto some lightweight stabilizer they were ready to sew. There were limitations, of course. Other than Black and White everyone brought a different range of thread colours.

But you can see they did a great job. As the stabilizer is lightweight it is liable to tear. I like this as a learning exercise not only for the value of learning to correct errors and mistakes but also it is very quick to tell you when there is too much thread in one place or your stitches are too large or you are moving the material too fast.

In spite of all that they still had very well finished, usable birds. All those small faults can be corrected when the cartoon is sew to a background.

After lunch they all dove into another bird, of their choice and colours. Some got further than others and my camera will capture their finished "homework" the next time we get together in May.

Some really ambitious work here. They did a stellar job.
My friends make me proud.
Well Done!