![\"Reflective](\"http:\/\/www.threadedviews.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/Reflective-Moment-master.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI know, I keep being naughty and doing more and more waterscapes!<\/p>\n
This one is 3.5 x 3.125 inches and depicts a heron in a river in White Rock, BC, having a reflective moment or probably just looking for some fish. \u00a0My husband did suggest the title Keep Your Heron but I said no.<\/p>\n
Lately I’ve been representing water with stitching, but for this scene I wanted to paint the water and make the heron and the surface water bubbles stand out by embroidering them.<\/p>\n
I used my wibble technique to paint the water. \u00a0Even though you’ll see a lot of vertical lines in the water (reflections of some trees we can’t see), they’ve been painted horizontally, with a zig-zag motion of the brush from side to side. \u00a0Wibbling is the technical term for this : ) \u00a0Water demands a horizontal approach, or it will refuse to look like water.<\/p>\n
The heron is stitched in regular sewing thread, in a mix of long and short stitches. \u00a0I tried to bulk out the body with an extra layer of stitches there.<\/p>\n
A tricky aspect of stitching anything that stands alone like this, is that all the stitches have to begin and end behind the heron. Especially with the darker colors, if I anchored them off to the side of the piece, it would show through the silk. \u00a0The poor heron would look like it had faint lines springing out of it in all directions, like an airport flight path diagram or something.<\/p>\n
And it was all looking a bit paint-by-numbers until I used an emery board to gently fuzz up the thread, which allows one color to blend into the next in a more realistic way. \u00a0I also used scissors to cut into threads sometimes to style as needed.<\/p>\n
The bubbles are stitched in a shiny off-white thread. \u00a0For the larger bubbles I sometimes bulked them up with a stitch of regular white sewing thread underneath first.<\/p>\n