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Between the Tides
This little panel (about 6" x 9") was done as an illustration for an article on embellished stitches for the Fall 2006 Quilting Arts magazine. Embellished stitches are where you lay down a base of one embroidery stitch and then work a second stitch by wrapping it around the base stitches. They're a great alternative to couching as a way to use threads that are too fragile or too thick to be pulled through the fabric repeatedly, and I use them a lot to add glitz and raised texture to embroidery.
This particular piece is based on some snapshots I took in Maine, of rust and algae on dock pilings. I don't do traditional sketchbooks, but I played around with the original pictures to create this digital collage, and was rather pleased and surprised that the finished piece actually had some resemblance to the starting "sketch" (below).
One of the results of working embellished stitches with fuzzy knitting yarn, as I did in this piece, is that you can't really see the underlying structure when you're done. (You can't see the underlying mistakes either, which is one of the things I love about fuzzy knitting yarns.) However, in the detail below you can see some twisty, multicolored lines snaking up on the right side. That's a buttonhole stitch worked over a chain stitch base, using a variegated, hand-dyed rayon thread. It's possible to force the buttonhole stitching to stay in a straight line, but here I rather liked the natural spiraling effect.
Here's a picture of that stitch in isolation, from the sampler I use for teaching purposes.
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