The Documented Life Project challenge for Week 21 was: “Add embroidery or embroidery floss to your page – no floss? use thread.”

This challenge reminded me of the last Great Big Stitched Postcard Swap I did using embroidery floss on my tulips. I have plenty of embroidery floss, but wanted to do something different for this challenge. I have not done any free motion stitching on my sewing machine for a long time and thought it would be fun to free motion stitch a design on paper for this challenge. You can check out the post about using the darning foot on the sewing machine to learn how to do this.

I switched to a needle I use for paper on the sewing machine and changed to the darning presser foot. Since it had been a while, I decided to just practice for a bit on the pieces of watercolor paper before doing a “real design”. It is more difficult to do the free motion stitching on paper than it is on layers of fabric. I used white thread on the white paper.  After stitching a few pieces of paper, I decided to try adding some color to them to see what would happen. It turned out well, so I decided that the stitching I had already done would work. At this point, I don’t have time to try to make the “perfect” design (I’m already behind in the challenges.) My goal was to try a new technique for the challenge. I lightly rubbed gellatos on top of the thread stitching as well as on some of the paper.The next step was to “paint” over the gellato coloring with water. The gellatos act like watercolors when you use with water. After painting with the water, I added more gellato coloring where needed to get the effect I liked. The threads took more of the color making the stitch design show up better. I ended up with three stitched pictures for the challenge.