Embroidery March: Bonus Wrap-up Post!

March has an extra Thursday in it, so I thought I'd look back on this month and see how some of my attitudes and perceptions have changed about embroidery in general and to show you some progress I've made on the various projects for the month.

Freestyle will be my first love as far as embroidery goes. I'm getting better at satin stitch, which I previously hadn't made much use of, and at doing more with fewer colors and stitches, such as with the snowdrops hanky from earlier this month.

I love the freedom of it and the ability to have all the tools of embroidery at my disposal. A++, would go again.

Blackwork is limiting, not only because it's entirely black, but also because it's a counted-stitch method. It's the opposite of my preferred freestyle embroidery, but limiting my toolbox, as it were, allows me to focus on how the weight of the thread and the density of the pattern affects the look of the design. Where freestyle is more like painting, this is pen and ink.

As an extra added bonus, I get to play with repeating geometric designs, for which I have an unnatural fondness.

A++, would go again.


Previously, I thought cross-stitch to be one of the, er... lower forms of embroidery. I sort of have a bias against the creepy large-eyed children and schmoopy sayings that tend to be done up in cross-stitch. Those and the Thomas Kinkade style pictures have never really been the sort of thing I like to do.

My own design based on illustrations from old books? That I can do. I will admit to liking the design process better than the actual stitching, but I like the stitching much more when it's a design that doesn't make me want to barf.
B+, won't ever be my favorite, but I'm enjoying what I'm doing.

Whitework is seriously hard to photograph, but looks pretty bitchin' in person. There's just something about white-on-white that gives me heart palpitations. Because, like blackwork, my embroidery toolbox is much more limited, I can focus on a different element of the whole embroidery picture. In this case, it's the way texture is affected by the structure of the stitch. I suppose this would be more like relief sculpture than anything else because whitework makes use of light and shadow playing off of the three-dimensional stitches. I've opted to go for something more like Mountmellick embroidery first because cutwork makes me feel woozy. When I can manage it without fainting, I'll be able to make use of negative space, too. I'm not there yet, though.
A++, would go again.

Bonus:

I like seed stitch. You could do a whole piece in seeding and it would be like some kind of embroidery version of pointillism.

This piece is giving me fits, though. These shapes between the flower petals and the petals themselves are very uneven. I still haven't decided if I'm just going to roll with it or take it out in a fit of pique. It's having a cool-off period for now.


And so we have come to the end of the first quarter. I'm going to keep working on these (except for the blue thing, which is in time out), but we're going to look at some new stuff in the second quarter as I continue to try to get the da Vinci Disorder under control.

April will be for Quilt Piecing  and I wish it were more alliterative and clever, but hey, whaddya gonna do? We're going to make some quilt blocks is what. I have quilt-based aspirations that need a good swift kick in the pants.

After that, we'll be participating in Me-Made-May, sort of. Not officially. You can do that here. Mostly, I want to do a retrospective to see what I'm actually using of the things I make. It's also an excellent excuse to get caught up on some of the projects I've started in the first quarter. May also tends to be a little wackadoo for us, so I'll need a breather for sure.

Following Me-Made-May in June is the Outfit-a-long, hosted over here by Ms Lladybird. Again, I won't be officially alonging, but I'm going to sew something to wear that I'm actually going to wear, then I'm going to knit something to go with the something I sewed.

See you at Stitches!

Embroidery March: Blackwork (reprise)

I've alternately been under the weather and distracted by nice weather. Last Thursday's blog post just escaped me entirely. I had meant to do a reprise of the blackwork post from back in January, so here it is, albeit a few days late.

Back in January, I talked about blackwork as a means of repairing weak fabric, but not really as a decorative art and that's what I want to talk about today. There are some really great pieces at the Victoria and Albert Museum, such as this woman's waistcoat that show the decorative potential of blackwork.

Image copyright Victoria and Albert Museum, London. 

If I had a higher resolution image, I'd be copying the heck outta that. I have been working on a small sampler and trying out  some different techniques.

The top left and bottom right designs came from my Reader's Digest Complete Guide to Needlework and the top right and bottom left designs are from my own brain. I'm pleased with how it turned out and I kind of want to do some more samplers just to see if I can't figure out some designs that are both in the Spanish style (reversible designs in Holbein stitch) and in the English style (non-reversible, organic designs like the waistcoat above).

I'm about as pleased with the back of it as I am with the front. The hexagon design did very well on the reverse, as did the picot on the top and bottom. I'm still working on starting and finishing threads more neatly, but I'm pleased overall.

My next challenge is going to be to figuring out how to use the density of the pattern to produce values of dark and light over a larger design. I'll let you know how it goes and if it all goes well, I'm considering writing up the little bird as a pattern.

I'm loving the simplicity of blackwork, though it's just about the opposite of my usual free style stuff. I'm used to working without counted stitches and in all the colors, but using only black reminds me a lot of pen-and-ink drawing. In the 17th century, they used woodcuts for inspiration.

The only thing that changed is that I grabbed this image from four thousand miles away and never had to leave my living room. This coming Thursday, I'll talk about cross stitch, which I have yet to successfully do. It'll be an adventure!

February is for Finishing: Taking stock

As you have likely noticed, I've finished a whole whack of neglected projects in the past few days. February is for Finishing is a fine tradition here at House of M and something I've done with my two dearest friends, Bekah and Koren, for some years. Usually, it's knitted things, but this year, I wanted to look very honestly at all my soft arts projects and see if I couldn't get some things out of my sizable pile of projects in progress.

The first thing to do is to tidy up.

To the left and below are what my crafting areas looked like a couple of weeks ago. I don't generally like to show my messes, but these are the result of rampant creativity.

I have lots of ideas, lots of inspiration, and it all just kind of physically accumulates in these two spots.

Before February began, I made a concerted effort, not only to clean up, but to list every project in these piles so that I know what, exactly, I have going on.

I found my end table.

I've also discovered that I can actually put my coffee there and I can put my computer there when I want to use my sewing machine (off camera to the right is my desk where both computer and sewing machine sit).

My other desk is a fold-up number, which is super handy for a small space, but not when it's so full of stuff that you can't actually fold it up. 

Once that was done, I had a complete list of every project I'd started or gathered the materials for and ended up with thirty-one. The greater majority of those are only in the planning stage, but I'd gotten as far as collecting the materials for the job. One or two were only in the idea stage. 

Four, as you've likely seen, have been finished since the beginning of the month and two pairs of socks have been frogged to reclaim the needles and to start again at a later date. That leaves me with twenty-five total projects on the pile, approximately half of which are in progress. Following the tradition of the Annual Airing of the WiPs, they are as follows:

1. A 9-patch pastel quilt that has several blocks sewn, but not enough. 
2. Stjarna, by Karolina Eckerdal. My goal is an even dozen stars for purposes of Yule ornaments and I have two finished.
3. Laurelhurst by NW Foraged. This is the second hat in this pattern that I've made, the first was for 25000 tuques and this one is for me. I'm just to the bottom of the color work pattern.
4. The art jeans. You've seen me work on these off and on. I don't expect to finish any time soon. 
5. Ballet Bear's steeked cardi. This is an experiment that is no skin off my nose if it fails. It might take a couple of days to finish. I haven't steeked before and a tiny cardigan for a bear seems like the way to go for experimentation. It isn't wool, though, and may be doomed to failure.
6. Crocheted Bed Scarf, inspired by the architecture of Chicago. I've done a goodly stack of blocks, but have a fair amount of yarn that I want to put into still yet to go. I might make some progress this month, but don't plan to finish.
7. TARDIS bag, which is a lot of fiddly stitching, but will probably look awesome if I ever finish it. I probably won't get to it this month.
8. Blackwork Bird Pillow that I started last month during the Month of Mending. I'm well into the snowflake border and the center is sketched out
9. Two small blackwork samplers, which were started at the same time as the pillow. One is nearly done, the other sketched out.
10. White silk spinning. All but about an ounce has been spun up into singles. This has a high likelihood of getting finished since I like to spin a little just before bed if I have time.

That's not too bad of a list, really, and some of that is certainly to be worked on this month. I may even finish a couple of those things, but there is one final project that will be the focus of my efforts:

11. Iris' quilt. "I'll finish before she goes to college" is less funny when the child in question is in high school. As it stands, I have 16/81 blocks quilted, which works out to about 20%. 

It was deeply satisfying to knock off several FOs early in the month, but now that I've started back on this behemoth, that's going to slow down considerably. It's harder to take this one to work on during dance class, though, so several of the smaller projects have hope of getting finished before the month is out.

Good luck in your finishing endeavors this month, my fellow makers. By next week, I hope to have whittled down the list of WiPs even more and I'll share some pictoral updates on my progress. 

FO: A bit of jeans mending

I feel like I'm batting a hundred today. 

Here's a sashiko patch in a "woven bamboo" pattern.

And some blackwork just above the patch where the fabric is getting thin. The thread matches pretty closely to the color of the jeans, so it should be mostly invisible. I'll know it's there, though.

Honestly, I'm not sure these are done-done or if they ever will be done. There are some weak spots near the pockets and belt loops that will need attention soon, but they're done enough to go back into the rotation.

Month of Mending: Blackwork Embroidery

As it turns out, I really didn't know that much about blackwork embroidery until this week, but I found an excellent history (with citations!) here. The most interesting tidbits that I learned from the aforelinked history were that blackwork likely originated in Egypt and that the painter, Holbein the Younger, depicted royal garments in such detail that the stitches could be seen. His portrait of Jane Seymour, Henry VIII's third wife, shows a particularly good example of blackwork on the cuffs of her dress, though Catherine of Aragon, Henry VIII's first wife, was an accomplished needlework artist and brought blackwork with her from Spain. The double running stitch used in blackwork is called Holbein stitch after the artist.

Those cuffs, tho'

For mending, we break all the rules of blackwork embroidery. Blackwork is generally done as a counted-thread embroidery on evenweave fabric, traditionally in black silk thread on cotton or linen.

I use blackwork designs to reinforce weak fabric, such as the area just below the pocket here. It was used in much the same way in the 16th century, but mainly, it's a decorative art. In mending, it both adds a layer of thread to the front and back of a piece that may see a little bit of abrasion and it binds the ground fabric, preventing raveling or fraying.

Stitching that is denser provides a little more reinforcement, but is difficult to do on fabric that is very weak or thin. Less dense stitching doesn't reinforce as well, but can be used on slightly thinner fabric. Here I've used a blue that closely matches the jeans for a subtler, textured effect.

Since I'm not using an evenweave fabric as a ground fabric, you can see on the right where I've hand-drawn a grid to follow. Mine is a little wonky, but yours doesn't have to be. I'm told there are these things called "rulers," but I think they're a fairy tale.

"Black"work doesn't have to be black, either. You can use any color that pleases you.

Finally, you can add a blackwork pattern to a patch to secure it. If you wanted to be super fancy, you could use an evenweave fabric as your patch to keep your stitches from being quite so wonky.

Here, I've used a heavy twill and the pattern isn't quite as even as I'd like, but I'm pleased with how it turned out.

Now I'm going to try it for real. Now that I've broken all the rules, I'm going to learn how to follow them. The back of the work doesn't look nearly as nice as Jane Seymour's cuffs, but that's something I want to work toward. 

Next week, I'll talk about sashiko and patching holes.