One thing I’ve ALWAYS enjoyed is the fine line between hard and soft, aggressive and sweet, monstrous and dainty.

A long time ago, in a blog post far, far away, I wrote about playing with sewing my paintings, and my embroidery inspirations…

I’m pretty inexperienced with embroidery, but I loved creating with thread.  I loved the feel of mixed textures on paintings, as well…  I got a little book on different types of stitches and just played around with them…

And even tried painting on canvas fabric and hand-sewing on top of it.  I was able to keep some of the detail of painting that I couldn’t get (or didn’t have the patience to get) with embroidery.

And then a reader asked if I had tried machine stitching.  And I hadn’t!  So I immediately gave that a try.  And OH what fun!

I think the first one I did was the Galdalf below–I loved the idea of working various stitches on my machine into his beardwork.  So much fun.  I started adding it to the backgrounds and into parts of peoples’ hair…

I even used it, in some cases, to represent part of a character’s story–like the battle-scarred Hound and Tyrion Lannister from Game of Thrones, below.

I can’t get enough of stitching everything now!  I love the variations of texture.  I still love hand-embroidering, especially when I can add the little beads and things.  Have you tried experimenting with a new medium?