Sunbathing - a stitching challenge

Here's another page I made for the Cocoa Daisy online crop and this time it was a challenge from Emily Pitts to use sewing on a layout. I sew on my pages quite frequently and so I tried to go with the idea of it being a challenge and I learnt a new decorative stitch.

I started off by adding some colour to the background. I love patterned paper, but I like it even more when I've added a bit of paint or texture to it. This time I used a Studio Calico hexagon stencil and coloured in some of the shaped with my Neocolor watercolour crayons. Then  I blitzed them with a water spray until the colours started to run and left it to dry.

Part of the challenge was to include a stitched title. I used some Thickers alphabet stickers as a stitching guide and made holes around each letter with a pin before putting the letters back into the packet for another day. You can see here that I stitched on some sequins too.

So here's my new decorative stitch. It's called fly stitch and I watched a video on Youtube to learn how to do it. I think it works really well as the sun's rays and definitely adds something to the page.