Crumb Cottage
Although it’s not really called Crumb Cottage – as far as I know anyway – it’s about the size of a crumb in my painting. I believe this cottage is on Pender Island, in between mainland Canada and Vancouver Island. You can see it on a ferry trip from Tsawwassen to Swartz Bay.
I painted the mountains and sky, and the mist between. Then I did some very casual free motion machine embroidery to try to give the look of distant fir trees. For some of the deciduous trees around the cottage I glued on a tiny amount of lint. I’ve discovered that serger thread quickly chops up as finely as you could want.
The cottage itself was tricky. In future I might use a tiny piece of felt rather than thread. I did this in thread by hand and it was difficult to keep the stitching more or less the same thickness, and keep doors and windows reasonably straight, and incorporate some colour variations throughout. Plus, you feel kind of mean, sticking your big old needle into someone’s living room!
The water was my favourite to do. I took lengths of high-gloss machine embroidery thread and split them into strands. That way you get two thin threads that are nice and wiggly, like hair when you loosen it out of a braid. They look like water without any effort from me. I did longer stitches in the foreground (forewater?) and very short ones in the distance. Oh and I sewed some tiny stitches in silver and green metallic thread here and there, and some invisible thread, for sheen and sparkle. All done, hurray!