After thread sketching approximately 652 trees (For real.), with about 150 to go, I decided to leave the forest for a spell and travel to the center of the utopia — the palace of the Margravate.
To accomplish this, I first enlarged and printed out an image of the center of the drawing. Then I traced it onto Sulky Tear Away Stabilizer, a product I use often in my map-making. I then pinned the stabilizer to the center of the quilt top and thread sketched right through the stabilizer.
Once the Big House was thread sketched, the real fun began: Removing the tear-away stabilizer.
Yes, there may be better ways to do what I just did, but this is a method I’m familiar with, and I felt confident that everything would turn out okay. I could have used wash-away stabilizer, as I sometimes do when I’m sketching something very densely, but that would have required that I use more water than I wanted to at this point and at this place in the piece. (I didn’t want to wash away all the lines I’d drawn for the formal gardens.)
Speaking of those blue lines, it occurred to me that some readers might not know that those blue lines will disappear with a light spritzing. That is, I use them to know where to sew, then I spritz and they’re gone.
Here’s the palace in its finished state, still wet from the spritz. Yes, I did manage to spritz away some of the blue lines marking the formal garden, but there are enough reference points left for me to be able to re-draw them pretty easily.
Now, back to the forest …