For the last five days I've been taking a class called Experimental Hand Stitch Level 1 from Gail Harker. She is a long-time City and Guilds instructor who has broken away from their standard curriculum and developed one of her own. She has an Art and Design track and a Hand and Machine Embroidery track that eventually merge (if you have the stamina) into a very high level fiber arts exploration. I teach natural dyeing for her sometimes and thought I would like to see what its like to be taught by her. I hoped that doing the hand stitch introductory class would blast me out of the narrow range of stitch options I have fallen into with my work.
On the first two days we dyed thread and felt with Procion MX dyes. I have never liked the unnatural brightness of chemical dyes, which is the initial reason I switched. I kept mixing them together to try to tone them down, with some success; one of my classmates wondered if I was depressed. I did enjoy the ability of the Procion colors to mix in the fabric. Natural dyes have much larger molecules so they don't feather and swirl like chemical dyes can do.
For the next three days we used our threads and felts to practice one stitch after another, continuously. We did running stitch, chain stitch, open chain, detached chain, circular chain, back stitch, stem stitch (this one I knew well) blanket stitch, split stitch, seed stitch, fly stitch, french knots and couching. It was very intense. There wasn't time to finish them. Gail monitored carefully to be sure we understood how to do each one, but there was no other evaluation from her. She wants us to finish these pieces on our own and make a sampler book to submit back to her for critique on technique, design and color. This gives me pause, as I have quite a lot of other embroidery on my list of things to do. I am wondering if finishing these things is necessary and a good use of my time, but I am reluctant to skip the evaluation. I have been working alone for so long I could use some critical input, but maybe not so much on this....I don't know.
The class did make me apply my needle in different ways, but the stitches we learned are the simple ones. I could see that Level 2 is where I would be breaking new embroidery ground for myself but I probably won't go there. I did find the class experience of being pushed all the time to consider color and fabric really broadening. On Saturday night as I drove home the colors and textures all around enveloped me so strongly it felt like I was seeing with new eyes. That alone made the class worthwhile.