Betsy Habich: Thread Paint Your Own Photo!, Price Includes $35 Class Kit (6 hr WS, Sat, 10/17/26, 10am-4pm EDT)

Thread painting gives you the freedom to create a photo-realistic image entirely from thread! After balancing our machines' tension, we will do several warm-up exercises (previous students may opt out), and then move on to our photos. Learn ways to stabilize your thread painting, look closely at color, texture, and line, and look for the detail that makes an image realistic. Participants will be asked to send 2-3 possible photos to the teacher for review at least 3 weeks before the workshop. Photos should be in focus with accurate color and good detailed resolution (images cropped from larger photos, and screen grabs from videos do not generally have enough information to make a good thread painting, though if that's the ONLY image you have, send it and I'll see if I can work with it. )
All Levels

The workshop fee includes the $35 class kit. The Class Kit includes:
- review of student photo graphs
- printing of student photograph on prepared cotton fabric
- prepared fused quilt sandwiches for project and for exercises
- directions on making and finishing a thread painting

An additional, optional kit is also available for $20 and includes Betsy's Self-published book: Thread Painting: the Basics and Beyond! 50+ pages of step-by-step directions, choosing a good photo, making the quilt sandwich, color blending, dealing with distortion, squaring up the thread painting; thread painting the natural and built environment: animal eyes and fur, flowers, deciduous and evergreen trees; sky, water, and light; shingles, stucco, stonework, board-and-batten, bricks; following a thread painting from start to finish. It's like a five-day workshop in a book! Click here to order Betsy's book.
 
Please note: Physical kits can only be mailed within the continental United States. 

Students to Provide
- sewing machine capable of free-motion stitching
- free-motion embroidery foot for your sewing machine
- size 14 top-stitch needles
- five cotton swabs and your sewing machine's cleaning tools
- sharp pointed scissors to cut thread right next to the surface
- steam iron, ironing board, and either parchment paper or other non-stick sheet
- size 50, 2-ply thread in all the colors you can see in your photo. My thread paintings typically have 20-30 colors in them.

Sewing Machine Required