Rhonda Bracey: At Random

I had the privilege of attending another 4-day workshop with textile artist, Sophie Standing. Last time (2017) we did a shell; this time, it was a kookaburra. I enjoyed the kookaburra more, as we could inject quite a lot of personality into its face (especially the eye) and body. Although some people used some pretty ‘out there’ fabrics, I always intended my kookaburra to be fairly realistic in its colours. So I chose fabrics that emulated its natural colours, as far as possible.

We all had quite a bit of prep to do before the workshop—in my case, that meant painting the background (leaves, flowers, branches, and a background wash over the blue duck fabric I used [note to anyone else doing something similar: check if the fabric is waterproof/water resistant! Mine was, so I had a hard time getting the background wash to take hold; the branches etc. I did with acrylics with a dry brush and no water in the mix, and they worked out much better). This was a residential workshop, so we could work as much as we wanted outside class time too. We stayed at Avalon Homestead about 5km outside Toodyay, Western Australia, which has two purpose-built crafting rooms, and 16 en suite bedrooms. Three yummy meals a day were part of the workshop fee too.

The photos below (click on an individual photo to see the detail) are just a selection of the ones I took showing the progress of my kookaburra.

The original photo of the kookaburra (permission was obtained from the photographer to use it)

My initial fabric choices; these changed a bit over the four days

Initial cutting, pinning, and placing fabric onto the background and drawing

We started stitching the beak by the end of Day 1

Stitching the eye was the first task on Day 2

Next came the head feathers and shading detail

Stitched tail feathers

Bird is all stitched, but the line between dark and light on the body was too harsh so I added large cream flowers to soften it

The claws were fun to do, and, to place the bird properly on the branch, I did quite a lot of black stitching on the branch to blend the joins

The kookaburra is finished! Notice that the yellow flower fabric on the neck is now gone. I added a small cream and apricot Liberty print to cover it and stitched over it to blend it in. The shiny blue fabric was some lycra I picked up in the dance fabrics section

I stitched the outlines and central veins of the painted leaves, the flowers, and the small branches

End of Day 4. A flock of kookaburras!

I had a bit of time left on Day 4, so decided to try stitching a large eye. I chose a cat’s eye and used about 20 different coloured threads to create this eye, which is about 2 inches high and 3 inches wide.

I had heaps of fun doing this class, and it reinforced how much I like thread painting. I really should do more of it.