While playing around with silk gimp the other day, I was struck with the inspiration to embroider this tree.

Now, trees may seem like fairly mundane, unimportant things, but can you imagine life on this earth without trees? Trees may be common, but they are, at the same time, essential, and in art, throughout history, the tree has enjoyed an important representative role, symbolizing many different things across cultures.

Trees show up in hand embroidery in practically every era and every culture, in some respect or another. Therefore, I didn’t feel too odd about branching out with the silk gimp the other day and embroidering a tree.

Today, I’ll show you how I worked the trunk and branches, and while meandering through the topic, I’ll talk a bit about the silk gimp used for the tree (making some clarifications about the thread, what it is, and its pending availability), and a bit about how you can adapt the process covered here to other materials. Ready?