I wanted to share some pop culture embroidery with y’all! Perhaps you’ve seen it already, but I wouldn’t want y’all to miss out. The hit TV show Game of Thrones has been working with the really talented embroidery costume designer Michele Carragher from London. She has a website! With photos! I have permission to share a few with you, but after that you have to go over to her site.

Here is a detail on Sansa’s dress where the design tells the character’s life story through symbolism from the family heraldic beasts:

The blue dress below combines smocking and embroidery for a highly textured dragonscale effect (dragons are very relevant to Danaerys!). She even gives instructions on how to achieve the basic smocking texture. In fact, she created three dresses in this style with an evolving design to go with the character’s development. You can read more about the changes in design and material. 

Stumpwork fish adorn another costume. Aren’t they amazing?

That’s all I can show you here, but there are also:

• three great illustrated articles about how she created some of the embroidered designs. Definitely worth a look, especially if you enlarge the images so you can see better.
• a gallery of Cersei’s dress, embroidered with  threads, small pearls, Swarovski crystals, metal beads, Italian tubular mesh wire, closed jump rings, and fine metal purl.
• a gallery of a whole lot more characters’ embroidered costumes

If you want to see these costumes from screenshots in the show, you can search for Game of Thrones embroidery.