Bluebird floral: Yet more leaves

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Hannah

Today is mostly a picture day. Four more leaves are done.

Let me zoom out, so you can see the different leaves and the color effects in combination.

Finally, here is a shot of all my progress so far:

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The Big Green: Part 3

Posted on January 6, 2012 by Hannah

Here is another guest post from Laura (aka Mom) about The Big Green.

The big blue and purple crocheted delphiniums have their floss counterparts embroidered in buttonhole stitch in the background.

Gold, brown, and tan floss in seed stitch forms a background for the delphiniums and also provides a base for the line of pink tulips in the distant background. The golden browns morph into the yellow flowers surrounding the blue and purple. These complementary (or almost so) colors next to each other really glow.

The Timeless Art of Embroidery by Helen M. Stevens contains many wonders. Her spiderwebs are so wonderful – I wanted one and she has instructions. After a few chuckles over the results I deleted said web and tried again….. and then again. Following a few expletive deleteds, I realized that my technical proficiency was just not adequate to the challenge. I removed the web again and used a single strand of floss and plain sewing thread to sew a spider web in running stitch. It is not as elegant as I would like but at least it looks like a spider web. Moral: Never give up – There is always a way.

The ground along the bottom edge is extended across the entire piece. The colors shift along the length to reflect or contrast with the colors of the flowers and leaves just above. Along part of the strip the colors are a mixture of browns, golds, and tans while in other sections pink and gold predominate. Beads are added where a special bit a glitter will direct the eye to points of interest.

Small pink flowers and leaves in floss finish the edge on the left. More ferny shapes appear again as well. Pink flower beads repeat the motif first seen in crochet.

This photo shows two entirely different ways of creating shapes. Some are formed by positive spaces, others by negative space. The leaves formed by either crochet or embroidery are positive space shapes.  However, filling in the background around leaf shapes that are outlined in stem stitch with densely packed textural stitches also creates sharply defined leaves. These are formed from negative space (background = everything else in a picture that isn’t a shape).

Enough for today.

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Creative embroidery kit

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Hannah

I thought I’d show y’all what I gave my mother for Christmas.

It’s a home-made creative embroidery kit! I went to the craft store and put it together myself. It includes ten balls of nice yarn with a variety of interesting textures, linen burlap, some very large needles, and a silk bag from Kyoto to carry it in. Here’s another photo of the yarns (one ball rolled onto the floor just before the last photo).

I wonder what she’ll do with them! Here are some close up photos of the textures, which should produce some very interesting results.

Oh wait, I dropped another one. Here it is!

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Circus Elephant I

Posted on January 2, 2012 by Hannah

I’ve spent the last couple of weeks designing. Here is my first finished piece!

I love my little elephant (the circle is 4 inches/10.2 cm across). I’m turning him into the front cover of a scissors case/needle book. I’ve got another elephant in the works for the back. Look how glittery the Kreinik gold is! I’m so happy with how it turned out.

I’ve kept track of materials and stitches. At some point I’d like to turn him into a kit/instruction pack, but that will probably have to wait until this summer when I have more time.

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More Palestinian Cross-stitch

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Hannah

Here is another Palestinian cross stitch piece from Dr. Shirazi’s collection. I absolutely love the warm colors and the geometric motifs.

The stitches are tiny and careful. The stitcher used the variegated thread to great effect.

A lot of these motifs were in the book about Palestinian embroidery that I reviewed in an earlier post, if you’re interested in making your own.

The back of this piece is unbelievably neat. It’s just as pretty (or maybe prettier) as the front! Look at this:

This is one of a special series of posts based on the embroidery collection of Dr. Faegheh Shirazi, from The University of Texas at Austin. Her research is on “textiles, dress, gender identity discourse, and material culture in the Middle East; the meanings of veiling; rituals and rites of passage as they relate to material culture.” Over the years she has collected a number of examples of embroidery from around the world, and has very kindly allowed me to photograph them for my blog.

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Branch for the Bluebird Floral

Posted on December 28, 2011 by Hannah

I’ve started work on a leafy branch. You can already see how the color variations in the leaves interact. Farther up the branch the leaves will be darker.

My Portuguese stem stitch is really improving – that long section in particular looks very evenly textured.

This project is a lot of fun, even though it has an enormous amount of long-and-short stitch and split stitching. Sometimes it’s nice not to think too hard about choosing stitches (or transferring a complicated pattern! preprinted fabric is so easy!), and I’ve still had a good time choosing floss colors.

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Future project: Line drawings

Posted on December 26, 2011 by Hannah

Everybody knows that Mary Corbet is doing twelve days of give-aways starting TODAY, right? 

So, while I’m visiting my parents, I’ve been going to life drawing with my mother. It’s a lot of fun, and I’ve got some lovely line drawings of figures. I would love to work a couple of embroidery pieces based on them. I’m still working out designs based on my drawings (don’t know when I’ll actually get started, but I wanted to tell you about the projects anyway).

I went shopping at an enormous fancy embroidery shop – Stitchville USA in Minnetonka, MN. Wow, they have a lot of beautiful things. You could drop a fortune in there. I ended up with materials for two projects of embroidered line drawings. One project has hand-dyed 40 count linen and hand dyed, dark red, variegated silk (Dinky Dyes 146 Mingenew). The other project has cream colored 35 count linen and dark red overdyed pearl cotton 8 (ThreadWorx 81089). Aren’t they just gorgeous? Of course, I could always use both threads in the same project for some variety.

Now, I will have to be very careful with this project! I suspect it would be a  very bad idea to try washing dark red hand dyed threads. I’m not so sure about the hand-dyed linen, either. So I’d better do a very careful transfer of the pattern so it’s covered by the threads and doesn’t need washing out. The transfer must be very accurate. Maybe prick-and-pounce? And I’d also better be very careful to keep the project clean while working it.

I’ve been thinking about stitches for the pieces. One place I looked is the Hand Embroidered Lettering and Text Tutorials at Needle ‘n’ Thread. I think for my projects the best options are back stitch, stem stitch, whipped back stitch, or split stitch. At the moment I’m leaning towards stem stitch with the silk and split stitch with the pearl cotton.

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Merry Christmas!

Posted on December 23, 2011 by Hannah

Our family Christmas tree:

It’s ribbon embroidery on chicken wire. Ours is twenty four years old – we replace any faded ribbons every year.

I always wonder why more folks don’t have embroidered Christmas trees. It’s such a fun project, and they don’t take up much floor space. Plus they’re easy to store.

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Castelo Branco Bird: Body

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Hannah

After troubleshooting the earlier problems with the project, I continued stitching away at the bird.

I think it’s looking great. Portuguese bird designs are so much fun. Here’s a close up of the bird body.

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Castelo Branco Bird: Difficulties

Posted on December 19, 2011 by Hannah

Well, folks, (previous project post to jog your memory) I started back on my Castelo Branco bird. There were some unfortunate mishaps. The lighter yellow to the right is earlier work. You can see the sudden color change where I started back up. I’m not sure what happened – did I pick up the wrong yellow? It’s definitely a possibility, because it’s been a while since I touched the project. Oops.

Since I already needed to fix the problem, I thought I’d begin again more carefully at the left, with two strands instead of three. I don’t know if it’s all the practice I’ve had stitching since last time, the change in the number of strands, or that I started using a thread conditioner (which I love), but it looks much, much better. So, that’s staying and the older work is going.

One last photo for the post, and then I’ll rip the right half out.

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