She's stitching!!! Blackwork!

I feel like I haven't picked up a needle in eons! But today I started a blackwork project with my Stitch and Surface students, and I actually got to start my own piece. We went to the digital lab and used photoshop to posterize and pixelate our images into a grayscale bitmap pattern to use for the blackwork design. The computers were a bit of a challenge, especially since the program was a bit different from my own, rendering my directions useless. But regardless, everybody ended up with a usable pattern to follow for their project. Next week we'll work on choosing patterns to fill in areas. And here's my piece so far:

I recommended outlining the areas and then selecting fills for each value. Some people weren't thrilled by the idea of working black on white, but I said it was open to interpretation. We're contemporary artists and we can bend tradition to our will! Note I'm working on a yellow and pink hand-dyed fabric. Mostly because it was the only plain-weave fabric I could find handy at 8:00 this morning when I was running out the door! HA!