Our group meeting this month was inspired by some Instagram tutorials that we saw by Neha Sachan. Here’s her Instagram if you want to see the videos we followed.

We started with white or painted heavy watercolor paper cut into approximately 5″ x  7″ pieces. I had collected a variety of twigs and sticks. Everyone chose their twigs and our friend Deb had donated some dried grapevines that were such fun shapes we had to use some of those too.  Then on to punching holes into the paper and stitching. It’s really fun and relaxing to sit and stitch with a group of friends.

Here’s Louise doing a bit of stitching. She’s doing backstitch in between her fly stitches.

Here’s Louise’s finished piece. I love the lichen that’s growing on the branch.

Here’s Louise’s other stitched down vine. The seed pod was a separate piece that she added as it seemed to fit perfectly. Not much stitching here besides couching down the various pieces.

Here are Sally’s two pieces. She hadn’t finished the bottom piece but had attached a twig from a Tamarack/Larch tree.

This is the beginnings of Paula’s piece. She has since added a bunch more French knots but I don’t have the finished picture.

Here’s a closer view of the French knots.

Here’s photos of my piece with the twig, fly stitch and back stitch. I made it into a greeting card. I tried to send it in the mail but got it back as it was “unmachinable”. I had to add more postage to get it sent. Always fun at the USPS.

Here’s my final piece with grape vine and little balls of wool stitched down.

We had a great time stitching together and once you have the holes punched in the paper, this is pretty simple. We have decided that this coming year, we will be working on creating a fabric book. We will be doing quite a few dyeing and surface design techniques to create our book pages. Our next meeting, we will be clamp dyeing on felt.