April 8, 2012
Happy Easter!
Just a quick note to wish you all a very Happy Easter! Here’s a little eye candy (to take the place of all that chocolate!) that combines a beautiful symbol of Easter with some lovely Ukrainian hand embroidery.
April 7, 2012
Hand Embroidery Happenings around the Traps
It seems there’s lots of stuff going on in the hand embroidery world these days, and I think that’s an excellent sign! You really can’t convince me that hand embroidery is a dying art. No, no, no! I think it’s definitely a living art, and I think it’s growing in popularity by leaps and bounds! This is wonderful – but it also poses certain difficulties, which I’ll talk about some day soon. (I have something brewing in my head, you see!)
For now, here are some things in the World of Hand Embroidery that have caught my eye lately and I thought worth sharing. Kick back, pour a cup of your favorite morning brew, and let’s slog through this journey together, shall we?
April 6, 2012
Free Hand Embroidery Pattern: Cross & Crown of Thorns
Today, I’d like to share with you one of the patterns available in Church Patterns for Hand Embroidery, Appliqué, Paper Crafts, Painting, & More. It’s a cross interwoven with a crown of thorns. The design is from Thomas Brown & Son’s catalogue of church embroidery designs from the early 1900’s, where it appears as a “square” cross (or a cross with equal length arms on all four sides). Here’s the design, with a PDF at the end of the article:
April 5, 2012
Goldwork: Couching Stretched Pearl Purl
Stretched pearl purl wound with a thickness of colored silk and couched down with the same color of silk is perhaps one of my favorite goldwork techniques. It’s a great way to combine silk and gold to make a striking, eye-catching twist that’s just really pretty.
I’m using this technique on the Medallion Project, and you can see it here along the edge of the “cinquefoil” that forms the center of the the whole medallion.
April 4, 2012
Nesting Place – Needlebook Finishes!
Last month, the final Nesting Place online class finished up here on Needle ‘n Thread. It was a great class! My heartfelt thanks goes out to Bobbi Chase, who offered me the use of her design for the class, to Lamora Haider and her crew at Access Commodities, who were so helpful in putting together the fine supplies we used in the Nesting Place project, and to all the participants who made it a successful and fun class!
Now, you just have to let me do the Teacher Brag thing a bit here. If we were in school, I’d be pinning up these class projects on the bulletin board and lining the school hallway with them! Needle ‘n Thread will be my bulletin board and my hallway today!
Though you might be tempted to think that all the needlebooks from the same class project would come out exactly the same, you’ll see here that this isn’t the case at all! Embroidery sometimes reminds me of handwriting – you can always tell that someone else has done this stitching or that stitching. And of course, when it comes to embroidery projects, there’s always that option of personalization! I hope you’ll enjoy seeing these darling needlebooks, the outcome of six grueling weeks of torturous embroidery!!
April 3, 2012
Stitch Play: Inside-Out Buttonhole Wheel Flowers
You can never have too many options for stitching hand embroidered flowers! Today’s embroidered flower-looking-thing doesn’t necessarily have to be a flower – you can work it on curves or lines as well. But worked in the round like this, it makes an airy, light flower that’s a lot of fun.
So, for today’s Stitch Play, we’re going to stitch an Inside-Out Buttonhole Wheel Flower. You can work through the whole process shown here, or you can stop at different stages for the effect you want. This is the complete element that I’ll show you today:
April 2, 2012
Monogrammed Whitework – An Exquisite Piece of Needlework!
I love whitework embroidery. I love monograms. I love drawn thread embroidery. I love linen! I love vintage linens! And I really love it when whitework and monograms and drawn thread are combined on one vintage embroidered linen! That’s what I call a winning combination! And oh, what a piece of embroidery this is!
Come gaze with me!
