The second Lochan piece inspired by Seurat’s Circus, I have developed the first Lochan piece further with added stitching.

This time I machine stitched the outlines to give me a base from which to work, using the same cotton sheeting as in the previous pieces. The image is the same and I coloured the background to get rid of the stark whiteness, after setting the colour I then washed it to soften the colours which wasn’t very clever because I lost some of them.

I started hand stitching the plants in the foreground using back-stitch to get small dots of colour using cotton thread. I resisted the temptation to use variegated colours because I wanted the colours to blend as dots of paint would. Using running stitch and brown thread I then filled in the space with running stitch, as the back-stitch is raised there is a textural difference between the plants their backdrop. 

I didn’t fill it all in with stitch, I worked the hills and trees in solid cotton colours but the reflection has synthetic threads in an attempt to give it a sheen as water, I am not sure that it worked but the stitches come out much finer as they mirror the scenery in the water. I hope that by leaving some of the areas unstitched I have created a more textural piece. I have to admit that it was very time consuming but it was fun to do and I think I have achieved what I set out to do!

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