| Add Another Layer - Stitching on Paper (Online)

Join Heather Hietala in learning how to bring new dimensions and unique tactile embellishments to your collages, photos, and prints using embroidery stitches. Enrich your artistic expression with texture, pattern, and color.

Note: This workshop will be held in a live, online format utilizing the Zoom platform.
Class meets on Saturdays, Sep 28 & Oct 5 from 10am-3pm ET.

For 20,000 years or so, people have used needle and thread to join and create. Over time the use of decorative stitching or what we call embroidery came into practice for embellishing. Decorative stitching creates a mark made by hand that adds a physical dimension, a sense of the decorative, of narrative and intention, and captures an action and sense of time.

During this workshop held on two consecutive Saturdays, we will explore stitching on paper and how a variety of embroidery stitches can add a new tactile dimension to a collage, photograph, or print. Stitching can add texture, mark making, pattern, delineation, a sense of embellishment, a color accent, and/or emphasis to a photograph or print after the act of printing. We will learn how to prepare and stitch on paper and how to dye thread so that you can customize the value and color of a thread to allow it to uniquely coordinate or provide contrast.

Materials Needed

Note: A complete materials list will be provided with links before the class starts.

• Button and carpet thread, pearl cotton
• Embroidery needles, needles large enough to accommodate your thread
• Beeswax 
• Small containers like yogurt cups etc for dying
• Tea, walnut dye, fluid or liquid acrylics, Sumi for dying 
• Practice prints or photographs
• Needle tool
• A piece of foam core or cardboard bigger than the print/paper
• Tracing paper
• Pencil with eraser
• Scissors
• Journal for note taking and favorite journal writing implement
• Optional – Japanese hole punch 

All images copyright Heather Hietala.