Trying my hand at needle painting

Initial exposure

Last fall, I allowed myself an unheard of luxury. During the first three days of Thanksgiving week, I took a solo vacation to get away not only from work, but also home and family responsibilities. My husband owed me one.

Purely for change of scenery I went to Philadelphia and, while walking around a holiday market, I saw a booth of a man whose work captivated me for days. There was close to a hundred super detailed pictures of flowers, animals and landscapes, and underneath each one there was a sign that said “THIS IS NOT A PAINTING”. I was confused and came up to take a closer look. To my astonishment, it turned out that all of them were ultra elaborate embroideries.

I spent that evening at a Barnes and Noble (which is always a happy place for me), but instead of looking at books, I spent over an hour sitting in the café and watching needle painting videos on YouTube. It was like crack for me. Three weeks after getting back home, I finally got a chance to try it out.

Gathering the courage to begin

These flowers used to hang over my daughters’ bed, and when we had to change the room layout, they ended up on the top shelf of my wardrobe, tucked away waiting for their day. For the longest time I was considering embroidering them with beads, which is still not out of question.

But after watching the videos I did when I was away in Philly, I decided to use them to try out needle painting. Before beginning, I spent weeks mentally negotiating with myself on whether I am willing to venture away from my usual bead work and try a different media, even though I have done plenty of embroidery as a teenager.  They say art needs to be uniform and within a follow a certain style, but sometimes it is the artist that can bring all of the art together.

So I went to Michaels and bought 6 colors of thread to be able to “blend” the colors.

With this project, rather than rushing to keep up with posting on social media, I decided to take it nice and slow, taking advantage of this as a therapeutic process.

Stay tuned to see further progress! (Psst, I am working on several projects in parallel, so I might vary which one I show next.)