Thread painting
Welcome to our thread painting page to accompany our hedgehog silk shading kit from The Bluebird Embroidery Co.! You'll find our video demonstration, tips and inspriation. Enjoy!
What is thread painting?
Thread painting is a style of embroidery where you blend colours of threads to create realistic shading and gradients - like a painting! It's a beautiful art form, often used to depict animals, nature, people and still life.
The essence of thread painting is using long and short straight stitches next to, and often on top of, each other to create smooth gradients of colour or richness and depth from having similar colour threads layered together.
My experience with this kit
Our thread painting kit makes a beautiful little hedgehog design. One of the things I like about it is that the design is pre printed and clearly divided into different sections, making it easier to see what areas are which when stitching.
I frequently referred back to the picture showing the suggested stitch directions on p.4 in the instructions. It was useful to consider how I needed to be aligning my stitches to make the hedgehog look realistic. You could draw these lines onto your fabric if you want, it will be covered up with your stitches and may help to guide you.
The colour blending was quite fun to do. You can get quite absorbed in choosing where to place each coloured stitch. I realised quite quickly that you need to make sure your stitches are all starting in different places so the overall finish is smooth. There was definitely a point where I started doing stitches in a line, and it was really obvious! So I just did more stitches over the top to hide this join.
Watch my video tutorial for this kit!
One last thought: if you get into thread painting you might find it useful to use an embroidery stand (this is one I found from a brand that I like, but there are many alternatives available). The advantage of a stand is that you have both hands free so you can have one behind the hoop and one in front and it makes it quicker.
Thread painting inspiration
I'm a big fan of lino printing and I follow a range of lovely lino printers on Instagram. Here are a few of them, I hope they inspire your future lino printing!
Emillie's beautiful nature inspired embroideries really showcase thread painting's ability to recreate the natural environment in a beautiful way. If you love Emillie's designs, you can purchase patterns or buy her books in her Etsy shop.
Michelle's work mostly centres around animals, and particularly pets. The way she captures fur and textures is incredible! She has also written a couple of books on animal portrait embroidery, plus she has an online course if you want to go deeper.
Sila creates beautiful portraits, mainly of women from the back - meaning that she can really focus on the clothes and hair! Her work has so much emotion built in, and the little details work to create lifelike images that really resonate. She also has a course, if you'd like to learn how to embroider people too!
Lucy's work often centres around glass vessels with liquid in, and the results are so incredibly realistic that you almost feel like you can pick them up! She is so clever with how she creates the shading to mimic light shining through the glass and the level of detail is astonishing.
I've also created a Pinterest board of tutorials, tips and inspiration! Click the picture below to see what I've pinned for you :)
