Third Place

I fell in love with this wonderfully fun painted canvas the minute the designer showed it to me.

Painted in red and white with touches of gold, this piece needed more than “normal” stitches. It needed movement, texture, adornments, and life! It needed laid filling patterns; padded kid leather appliqué for the breastplate; handmade gold wire adornments and real metal threads for the bracelets; and paillettes added to the dress. As I personally did not like the red and white batik pattern painted above and below the family, I chose to pad and hand quilt a softer tone of batik fabric to the canvas, bringing everything together.

The challenge for me was to take this contemporary canvas and combine other needlework techniques, to create “my” dancing family. There are 13 laid filling patterns and 17 different thread selections.