I am currently deep in the process of creating the video for thread painting my opossum art quilt. Thread painting, thread sketching, however we name it, is fascinating to me. In some ways, it is similar to embroidery – specifically, machine embroidery. The thread is stitched onto a surface to create a design, texture, or detail.
The major difference is that the way I use thread painting is to add more to an existing art quilt, rather than creating an embroidered stand alone design.
The other difference is that I do the thread painting on the art surface, meaning the fabric panel with the collage, mixed media or other artwork. The thread painting is done before making the quilt sandwich and quilting all layers. Two small art quilts I have made show how I used thread painting.
Examples of Thread Painting
In this portrait art quilt (5″ x 7″), the hair is emphasized and defined using thread painting.
Machine thread painting allowed me to create individual strands of hair to create the movement and frame the face.
For this art quilt with roses (9″ x 12″), you can see the difference between the thread painting and the quilting. The roses and leaves are thread painted but that stitching does not go through all quilt layers, it is done to the top layer that uses the green as the base fabric. The quilting stitches are around the flower petals on the green areas.
The thread painting added dimension to the roses by adding areas of value and form on top of the fabric collage.
How I Thread Paint
I thread paint with a sewing machine that is capable of free motion quilting, because the process is somewhat similar. The machine needs to be able to drop the feed dogs, and the foot should be a free motion or darning foot. This allows the fabric to move freely underneath the needle and it does not get pulled through.
Thread painting is done by choosing the thread colors I want to use. This is ideal because now I can use thread as the palette, and that really gives so many more opportunities to enhance the art quilt. It also means I change the thread color often. For the roses, I tried to plan so that I could use the light color on all of the flowers, then switch to a medium pink, then finish with the darker pink. Like my traditional artwork, I tend to build up from light to dark values. Lighter colors are used to enhance shape and form and develop areas of value. My darker colors are often the most defining, used to outline areas, or create dimension. Depending on the art quilt, the number of thread colors could increase quite a bit. These are small quilt examples, so I didn’t use many colors. Thread painting can be quite time consuming, though, because having to switch the thread out to change colors adds time to the process.
I use machine embroidery thread. I have been using the Brother Embroidery Bobbin Thread, which is a 100% polyester thread available in black and white. I usually use the white because the bottom threads are never seen so it doesn’t truly matter what color the bobbin thread is. I use Sulky embroidery thread for the top thread (388 colors available). This is 40 weight, 100% rayon. I am considering switching to 30 weight or trying other brands, such as Madeira (422 colors available), because the Sulky breaks more often than I’d like. I have a good collection of Sulky at the moment, and I’m not quite ready to invest in another thread palette just yet.
Many of my art quilts are multiple layers of collage, which makes them quite dense, so I don’t use a stabilizer like I would for machine embroidery. However, if I am thread painting on a single layer or a double layer with the collage fabric, I will add a light to medium weight stabilizer to the back.
Using free motion means the art quilt can be placed underneath the foot, and then strategically moved to lay the thread. This really offers a lot of creative flexibility, but instead of applying the color to the artwork, you have to think about where to move the fabric to stitch the thread. This can be challenging, but having a basic sketch of where you want the values and details to be can help guide you.
Stitching involves moving the fabric back and forth, sometimes side to side, pivoting the piece around, and building up layers to create values, blending, and texture. This is the fun part!
I think the beauty of the thread painting technique is that you can really use it to create an art quilt that looks like a painting. I personally use mixed media, so I also apply acrylic paint and Inktense to my paintings, but there is a certain charm to creating rich, detailed art quilts using only fabric and thread.
