Stitch sketching has been gaining popularity in recent times, with several books on the subject coming out in the last year alone.  I will state now that I haven’t read the books, so this is entirely how I’ve interpreted the building up of images with combinations of fabric and thread.  I’ll do 3 posts in the coming weeks showing the process that I follow, I hope it helps, but if you have any questions please let me know in the comments.

The first step in the process is to work out what image you want to use.  For this mini below that I made for a swap a few years ago, I noticed that my partner had a couple of cameras in her inspiration mosaic, and as this was an Instagram swap I thought it would be good to have a bit of a play on its logo too.

I trawled through some photos of vintage cameras on google images and found a suitable candidate to use as a basis and used that to sketch out a pattern for the fabric pieces.  The idea was to use fabric that most suited each piece of the camera, then use thread to sketch in the details afterwards.

As you can see the thread created some dimension to the knobs, flash hot shoe and lens, as well as adding the lettering to the lens and creating the strap webbing.

Sometimes though, you don’t have the time or the ability to draw an image yourself from scratch, so that’s the point that I turn to buying patterns.  For this pouch that I made before Christmas I used a pattern from Daisy Girl and Company on Etsy.  Although it was designed as a hand embroidery pattern, the outlines worked perfectly for me to use as a stitch sketch pattern.  Thread allowed me to create dimension in the truck and the tree, as well as adding in some snow round about.

For this series I’ll be using another hand embroidery pattern from Urban Threads, but other good sources of images are colouring books or even photos, just don’t forget to credit the original pattern creator if you’re using one that you didn’t draw yourself :o)