I actually started on this months ago but only this weekend did I finally get to a point where I’m ready to put needle to fabric!
I bought a needle painting for beginners course on sale on Domestika a couple of years ago, and I’ve made it a goal this year to finally do it! The course was created by Valentina Castillo of insanitynice who is Chilean and the course is in Spanish, but there are decent (though not perfect!) subtitles and with the video I can understand enough!
The start of the course has some useful tips for planning your work. Finding an appropriate photo of each cat turned out to be a time consuming task! I needed one with their face in full view and with right lighting to provide definition in their black and white fur. Our cats are not fans of photoshoots, so I gave up trying to take new ones and trawled through my partners folder of photos!
Valentina used Illustrator to trace a vector outline of her reference photo, but I don’t have that so I used Procreate on my iPad. It took me quite a while to figure out how I wanted to compose things to fit both cats.
So far my favourite tip from the course is to use a colour picked tool to figure out what colours to use. Again Valentina used Illustrator for that but I decided to use Canva because again I have it on my iPad and I find it really easy to use (easier than Procreate!). I picked out the colours I thought I’d need and put them in squares of “swatches” around the photos so I could print it and take it to the shop to try to match skeins!
It took me a long time to get around to going to Hobbycraft to do this! And about 40 mins in there faffing around trying to match the best I could. I actually found the range when it comes to very dark greys and light greys a bit limited! But hopefully what I got will work.
Hobbycraft has gotteb very expensive for skeins (£1.50), and I needed quite a lot of colours (about 18 because somehow these two black and white cats still have different shades in their eyes, noses and ears!) so I decided I’d use my £5 loyalty birthday voucher for a handful and noted the rest of the codes to order online for 99p each I stead.
Finally this weekend I’ve got around to finalising my design and transferring it to fabric! I tried just tracing it with my light box but I was finding it hard to get accurate details through/on the fabric with my pen so used another sheet of the printable sticky fabri-solvy for the cat faces. (This time I remembered not to set the printer paper type to iron-on-transfer paper because that prints things bloody backwards!)
So now I am ready to actually start stitching! I’ve never tried to do anything like this before so I’m excited and also anxious about getting the fur right!
