Life Drawing from Home: Stitch (Part 1 of 2) (Patreon)

Sewing, stitching and embroidery are terms that are frequently associated with decorative craft and hobbies but they also can be applied to drawing or painting. Textiles and sewing are steeped in history all across the world and have much to offer in contemporary art. In this post you will be shown how to recreate your own drawings with hand stitch onto fabric. You don’t need any prior knowledge of sewing to be able to use these techniques, just some basic materials and a selection of drawings. In recreating your drawings, you will have the opportunity to edit parts of your drawing if you wish to do so and enhance them with colour and texture. I recommend reading through all the steps before you begin.

Aims and objectives:

• To learn how to transfer a drawing onto fabric
• To learn how to use hand stitch to recreate your drawing
• To explore the possibilities of sewing and textiles as a medium to work with

Materials

You will need:

• One sheet of tracing paper – A4
• HB pencil
• Some plain white or off white fabric – approximately A4 (calico is ideal)
• Some chalk or pastel pencils or very soft graphite pencil 4b or softer
• Masking tape
• A needle
• Small pair of scissors for snipping thread
• Some coloured threads
• Your own drawing

Exercise 1

Step 1. Look through your drawings and sketches and choose one to recreate. Ones that work best for this method are drawings that have clear lines, as it is the lines that you are going to hand stitch. Choose something simple to begin with and treat this as a sample, something to learn the technique with. You can always repeat the exercise again if you want to do something more complex. Blind contour drawings work particularly well.

(Sample drawings from a sketchbook suitable for stitching)

Step 2. In this step, you are going to trace your drawing onto the tracing paper with your HB pencil.  A4 is a good size to start with as hand stitching takes time, so in most cases, the bigger the drawing the longer the stitching will take. Check that your drawing will fit onto your fabric. If you have an A4 drawing and A4 fabric, then all well and good. If your drawing is too big or too small, scan or photograph your drawing and then print it out on an A4 sheet of paper so it will fit. If you don’t have a printer, choose an appropriate sized drawing or use a big enough piece of fabric so it will fit.

Step 3. You will need to trace your drawing twice so that it will appear the same way round as your original drawing. Trace your drawing with your HB pencil and tracing paper. At this stage you can omit or change parts of the drawing if you wish to do so. There may be a line or a mark in the wrong place or something you don’t like, so only trace over the parts you want to keep and make any adjustments to the drawing you think may improve it.

Step 4. Now turn over your traced drawing, and with your chalk, pastel or soft pencil, trace the drawing on the other side of the tracing paper. If you are confident with using photo editing software, you can flip your image round before printing it out so that you only need to trace the drawing once with your chalk or soft pencil and omit or edit any lines you want to change.

Step 5. Turn your traced drawing over and hold it just above the fabric with the chalk side down so that it faces the fabric. Don’t place it down immediately, hover it around while you decide where you want the drawing to be placed. You may want it in the middle, but placing it to the side, bottom or top could be other options. Placing it down on the fabric too soon may mark the fabric, so hover it around until you are happy with where you want the drawing to go. Once you are happy with the position of the drawing, place it flat down onto the fabric and tape the sides with some masking tape. If you have accidentally marked the fabric, try lifting the marks off with some masking tape rather than rubbing it off as it may make it more difficult to remove. With your HB pencil, rub the drawing onto the fabric, you might need to press quite hard but try not to tear the tracing paper.

Step 6. When you think you have rubbed the whole of the drawing onto the fabric, carefully lift a corner of the tracing paper to see if your drawing has rubbed off successfully. If everything looks ok, then remove the rest of the tracing paper. If parts of your drawing are missing, just add them in with your soft pastel. If you can’t see an image, try rubbing again a little harder. If that doesn’t work, you will need to start again with a different type of soft pencil, it might be worth experimenting with a few different pencils to see which work best. 

Step 7. Now you are going to start stitching the lines. Thread your needle with a thread of your choice and tie a knot in the end. I usually measure my thread by an arms width, too short will mean that you will need to rethread too often, too long and your thread will tangle more easily. Start anywhere on your drawing and pierce the fabric with your threaded needle from behind so that it comes up on the line of your drawing. Pull it through gradually until you feel the knot tug slightly against the fabric. If the knot comes all the way through, start again from the back but don’t pull it all the way through, leave enough thread so you can pierce the fabric again from the front, and tie a knot at the back.

Step 8. Continue to stitch the line by piercing the fabric from behind and coming up a space ahead, then bring your needle back down into the same hole at the end of the last stitch you made. Here is a demonstration on YouTube.  

Try not to pull your thread too tight otherwise you the fabric will gather and will not lay flat. Use smaller stitches for curves and if you get a knot or tangle in your thread, gentle rub the knot between your thumb and forefinger until it untangles. Take your time and don’t rush, it’s good to take frequent breaks and stretches while you are sewing so you don’t become too stiff.

Step 9. At some point you will run out of thread and will need to cast off and begin again with some more thread. You will need to leave a few inches of thread for this and tie a couple of knots at the back of your drawing like this. Keep your drawing near to you while you are sewing, you might see that some lines are thicker and/or darker than others. 

Try using some double thread for the thicker lines or a darker colour. If you do something you don’t like, you can always unpick it and redo it. It does take time and if you feel that you’ve had enough then take a break and return to it later.  

Step 13. Once you have finished sewing and satisfied with your drawing, you can iron it to remove any creases. Treat it like you would any other drawing you would want to present to someone, either put it in a frame or back it onto card with a bit of glue to make it stiff. Bigger drawings can be stretched over stretcher bars to hold them in place and then hung.

Summary

Hand stitch or slow stitch has a particular quality that cannot be replicated by machine stitching and the same could be said vice versa. You should try to aim for accuracy with your stitching but don’t worry too much if your stitches are a bit uneven as it is the imperfection of the stitches that makes them special. The joy of hand stitching can be found in the meditative qualities by the repeating of actions and process; it does take time but it does offer you the opportunity to process your thoughts whilst being creative. It is affordable and clean so a great medium to work with if you are limited for space and money.  Hand stitching is part of the ‘Slow Movement’ that addresses issues of time poverty which you can read more about here.

Moving Forward

Next week we will be continuing Drawing with Stitch in part 2, marking the fabric with coloured inks and creating more lines with stitch. In the meantime, you can search on the web for contemporary embroidery artists to see what they are doing and a good reference source to look at is Textile Artist.org.

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This is the seventh of our weekly 'Life Drawing From Home' blog posts, commissioned using money raised on the Draw Patreon. Please do share your drawings with us, as we would love to see what everyone is up! Just tag us with @Draw_Brighton on social media or use the #LifeDrawingFromHome and #DrawBrighton hashtags. this article was written by Shelley Morrow - you can follow her on Instagram at @shelleymorrow1 and you can see more of her work on her website www.shelleymorrow.com.

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