Painting With Thread

People often say to me, I must get through a lot of thread and have a large collection in order to achieve the very many different colour tones and shades within my work. Well it's true on both counts, to give you a idea of how many threads I use, here is part of the collection I used on my latest piece whilst embroidering one hare.

I say part, as whilst I was embroidering, I realized there was a lot more tones of grey than I had first observed in the hare. It always amazes me how many different colours animals have that you just don't see straight away, but on inspection there are a vast amount, even tones you just wouldn't except like purple, blue and green! You will have to wait and see the finished hare on my next post which will be coming in the next few days. You may be wondering 'Why so many threads?' well embroidering is very different to painting. When painting you can easily mix colours to adding light and shade, and fade colours together creating lots of different shades. Well this is much harder with thread as, you can't mix or fade them in the same sense as you can with paint. I have taught myself how to do this with threads when machine embroidering and over may years still find myself leaning new techniques when creating different characters. You can see for yourself a great number of threads are needed just for one hare and can image the process is much more time consuming to that of painting, as I start by painting the character before I embroider!!!