Beach huts picture

Coming from a seaside town, beach huts like these are a reality. I love this picture full of bold colours, both plain and striped. The original idea was just a row of 5 beach huts. I designed the beach hut first onto paper, then transferred it onto card - as card templates are much easier to draw round (and of course they last longer!). Deciding on the colours was quite a challenge. You can only use the actual material you have, so deciding on what would work and what wouldn't was quite a challenge but i enjoyed every minute of it!

Assembling the beach huts onto the white background material was easy as I used Thermoform (a bondaweb alternative - sew Sewing Insight page). However, i learnt a valuable lesson a few months ago...not to use free-motion embroidery when trying to re-create straight lines! Invariable they will be slightly wobbly and will just give the impression of someone who can't sew in a straight line! I also decided (and the jury is still out on this one!) to use different colours of cotton depending on what colour material i was sewing. Normally, I would have just sewn all of it in black but i felt that that would have created hard lines which are much less forgiving when you are trying to sew lines so close together, such as the apex of the huts.

When the huts were assembled and sewn....the picture still didn't look right to me. It lacked depth and form and didn't seem to look like it could stand on it's own as a picture. I thought about maybe putting some material at the bottom to represent sand but I thought it detracted from the huts. Then I thought about adding flags to give the impression of movement. I was going to put a flag on every beach hut but again that didn't seem right.. So I opted for two flags and as daft as it sounds, it took me a while to decide where to put them! I didn't want the picture to be too balanced in case it looked artificial!

With the two flags now in place, still the picture lacked something! Eventually, the idea of two seagulls came to mind. Again, it took a while to decide where to put them and at what angle and size but I like what they add to the picture. They give the picture a fluidity in a largely static picture. I then went against my norm and decided to sew the seagulls in grey cotton with free-motion embroidery technique. I think black seagulls would have been too bold.

In the end, i think the picture turned out fairly well but if i was to be critical? I wonder if next time, when I'm sewing around the white beach huts, maybe I'll not use white cotton, it doesn't stand out and maybe that's not such a good thing?