Lighthouse Landscapes

Recently, I've been playing around with color mixing, contemporary goldwork and mixing it all on digitally printed fabric.  For this piece, I started looking at lighthouses in North Carolina and Prince Edward Island.  I have always loved lighthouses as I grew up going to the Outer Banks near Cape Hatteras all the time.  In my research of lighthouses on Prince Edward Island, Canada, I found the New London Lighthouse and loved the quaintness of the lighthouse and the drama of the beautiful coast in the background--seriously there are some amazing photos of this lighthouse!

I started by roughly watercoloring a piece of cold press paper with a "land" area and a "sky" area.  I wanted to keep the watercolor loose so that my stitching could add the detail.  I then scanned it in and had it digitally printed on a cotton/linen canvas fabric.

Once I had my canvas, I experimented with different fabric scraps and decided on this beautiful silk and metallic tweed/brocade I bought this summer at the Silk Society in London for the body of the lighthouse.  The roof is created with leather kid.  Pearl purl is used to define the details of the lighthouse and create the balcony and mica bits were used for the windows.  For the sky and the grass, I used long straight stitches and Valdani thread and mixed in some cutwork. 

Overall, I'm fairly happy with this piece. The only sad part about it for me is it photographs a lot heavier than in person.  The silver I used in the clouds shows as gray here but in person, it is just glimmers of silver and the grass is not as dark as it is showing. 

I really enjoyed working on this piece, and I think that this idea has a lot of potential going forward.  It was a great challenge to try and create a lighter feeling composition with goldwork materials and to mix the color mixing techniques with the gold materials.  Even more exciting are the ideas I have for future pieces!