31 Days of Stitch Design

Hello everyone and welcome to the month of March.  

This is my first time posting here on the Fire Blog, although I’ve followed the blog for years. My name is Clara Nartey and I’m a textile artist blogging at ClaraNartey.com

This month, I’ll be doing something a little different from what you’re used to. I won’t be doing surface design techniques.  Although sometimes, I’ll use fabric that I created using surface design techniques.  When I use my own hand-dyed fabrics, I’ll talk a little bit about the process I went through to create the fabric.

However, my main focus this month will be to show you how I use thread, rather than dyes and paints as  design elements on fabric.

I  love creative challenges. So, I challenged myself to use stitching as a form of design to create one piece of stitched work every week for 52 weeks.  I'm creating my 50^th piece this week. Thus, I’ve got only 2 more to go to finish my challenge. 

So here’s what I want to do with you - a 31-day challenge, where we use our sewing machines not for decorative stitches but for drawing and creating design elements on cloth.

This is not embroidery.  It’s going to be free motion drawing using a sewing machine.  So you don’t need an embroidery unit attached to your sewing machine.

I’ll see you on Friday with the tools and supplies you’ll need to follow along in this challenge.  You’ll have the weekend to get your supplies together and we’ll start working next week. 

For all the other Fridays in March, we’ll do an open Q & A thread, where you get to Ask Me Any question (AMAs).  Sometimes, the internet can be so impersonal it’s easy to lose the human touch.  

So I like to make people know they’re interacting with another human being by not only giving them the chance to ask questions but also, get answers to their questions.  That way you know there’s a human on the other end of your computer screen. :-)

I’ll answer all your questions as soon as I can. Please feel free to chime in with an answer or give your opinion on any question. Questions can be on any topic - creativity, art quilts, blogging, surface design -  any topic. I think Friday AMAs will be fun.

I’m excited to get started with this.

See you on Friday.

Warmest Regards,

Clara.