Embroidery

I do embroidery sometimes!

I started doing embroidery in high school, and it quickly became my favorite craft. Putting on an audiobook or podcast and stitching away is just a fantastic balance of fun and rewarding. I've gotten through so many books while working on embroidery, and even brought a few projects to lectures with my cooler professors.

Project Tour

My Sampler Bag

front side

I started this bag when I realized I wanted to do embroidery as a hobby back in high school, and it's been a work in progress ever since! My first pieces were these floral designs inspired by the source of most of my inspiration: pinterest.

From there, I built confidence until I was trying things like this big lemon slice, which is still probably the most amount of stitches I've ever done in such a small area of fabric.

Eventually, though, I started to feel like the designs I was working with weren't really taking advantage of the medium as much as they could, and that was when I discovered blackwork embroidery.

In broad terms, it is any embroidery done in one color which contrasts the fabric color (if it is the same color as the fabric, it's called whitework embroidery). More specifically, most blackwork embroidery designs are in conversation with historical styles of embroidery, particularly that of the renaissance and tudor periods.

Being a history student at the time, I was excited to find a way to marry these two interests in such a fun way, and with the help of this tutorial, I recreated this pattern from an embroidery sample in the Victoria and Albert Museum digital archives.

Blackwork quickly became one of my favorite styles, and I started covering my bag with them. Soon I was creating my own blackwork designs and experimenting further.

Visible Mending

These projects emerged out of necessity. It takes about two years of fruitless shopping trips before I find a pair of pants I like, so when my phone started ripping holes in the pockets of all my pants over time, a solution had to be devised. This is what I came up with.

[Picture to be added once the jeans are out of the wash] It's just a running stitch, woven together like a textile. This repair was added in January, and it's held up perfectly which was a bit of a surprise to be honest.

Clothing Customization

Shoes

Some converse I customized inspired by bowling alley carpet

Sweaters

This is an in progress sweater customization based off the branching design on my bag

...Curtains?

You heard that correctly. My current primary work in progress will optimistically take me about a year to complete. I have decided, for some ungodly reason loosely related to [morningmercury's insane embroidery project], to create custom drapes for my room by embroidering about one third of the area of a set of floor length velvet curtains. I don't actually know if I will finish it, but it will make for something to do while watching tv in the meanwhile.