A bold black line

I've been stitching up a storm over here ever since I was informed of an exhibition opportunity for February. I'll be having a solo show at the Shipley School's gallery, and I want to have new work for the show. My past 2 years of grad school have been more focused on education than studio work, and the studio classes have projects that aren't always related to my preferred focus of medium or subject matter.

So to that end, I've begun at least 2 new pieces- both long, narrow cloths. One will be a vertical river-like strip, and this one will be a horizontal panorama. I've been quite enamored by a spool of black tatting-weight thread lately, and have been enjoying drawing with it on cloth.

 This skewed view is a night's worth of whipped backstitch to draw the Ben Franklin bridge and Camden waterfront onto some red silk I cut off my wall piece. The whole piece will be about 3 ft long and only 4 inches wide. I pieced together the panorama from various screen shots from Google street view, traced it onto vellum as a pattern, but forgot my transfer paper, so have been free-handing it. I really like line drawing in thread, and a whipped backstitch makes such a lovely line.

For the past week I've been teaching a morning intensive Stitch and Surface class, and the black thread was brilliant on this yellow arashi linen. This is my demonstration sampler which built up as I showed students individual stitches. The bits of color are either Shisha embroidery or reverse applique pieces. I love, love, love reverse applique....

The spool of black thread is nearly exhausted. I'm going to have to run out for more soon. I wonder sometimes how many miles of thread I've stitched in my lifetime...