embroidery Archives - Page 13 of 19

Sketchbook update

This time around I have a page and a half to show you. I finally finished the back side of the very first page I stitched:

Since I have a lot of crafts with near-term deadlines, I didn’t do any hand embroidery this round. There will be plenty more of that, but I wanted to get something completed without spending several days on it. Hence, more machine embroidery. This time I colored the page before doing the stitching, and made the page pastel and the stitching black, like scratch-off coloring pages that are black over colors. I also switched from regular zigzag to a special diamond-shaped zigzag.

That was actually the underside while I was stitching. You can tell the kind of thread I had in the needle: copper metallic. Metallic thread is hateful stuff, but I am continually drawn to it despite that. Here’s the upper side:

I worked it out and if the cover is included, I have to do a page a week from now on to finish the book on time. I’m not going to do exactly that; I’ll leave more for Thanksgiving and winter breaks. However, it was a boot to the rear to see those numbers! Starting in late November you can expect sketchbook updates to come slightly more than monthly.

Finished sampler and class

Tonight is my embroidery class! I am all set. I have my sampler:

I have other examples of embroidery to show them:

(not shown: Children’s Book Quilt embroideries, Saturation, a couple more cross-stitch pieces, as well as some pictures of pieces I found online)

All but one of the pieces above are by me; the tea towel was a flea market find.

I have a blog post on the Sew-Op’s blog with informative and inspiring links.

I have a box of floss:

I have handouts!

(not shown: a few hand-drawn rub-on patterns of simple things)

Incidentally, I wound all that floss by hand, half a skein per bobbin. At some point I decided to unwind and halve a whole bunch of skeins at once, thinking I might like it better if I could just wind and wind and wind. I almost didn’t want to wind any of it because it was such a pretty installation art piece:

Wish me luck!

P.S. Happy birthday, Mom!

Saturation

The finished quilt: a 6″ by 6″ piece titled Saturation. It will be shown at an art fair on Wednesday.

The title came before the design; I was considering a quilt of leaf-patterned fabrics but just wasn’t feeling it, and the Feeling Stitchy August stitchalong was on my brain as well. I started looking at the fabrics and seeing what I liked, and the rich, saturated colors were the ones that grabbed me. Colors are saturated when they are very far from a gray of the same lightness. I think of saturated colors as being Very: very intense, very themselves. They don’t have to be dark or primary colors, but they are not going to be neutral.

On top of the saturated colors I saturated the quilt with embroidery. I tried to find a way to put an additional level of saturation into the quilt but I didn’t want to be so literal as to make it evoke the molecular structure of a saturated fat, or the mathematical structure of a saturated bipartite graph. Two levels will do.