I started embroidering this year and I have been loving it! It’s like drawing and painting with thread.
I’m by no means perfect or even ‘good’ at embroidery. Since it’s new for me, I find myself focusing on every stitch. I forget everything else except the stitch, so it is very zen as an activity. Maybe embroidery is like this for people who are very good at it, I’m not sure.
The cool thing about embroidery is anything can be embroidered, especially after making a plan and identifying the right techniques
Sometimes I find myself thinking about other stuff while drawing or painting, I think this is because I’ve spent so much time mastering drawing and painting that my brain, sometimes, doesn’t need to focus as much to make what I am hoping to make. While drawing a face I can very easily start thinking about chores or traffic or some kind of drama. It’s not always this way but sometimes it is.
With embroidery, it’s not this way - if I drift off in thoughts it’s usually to a neutral space where I’m not thinking about other things. It’s a chance to focus evenly.
I took a local class on embroidery and learned a few different types of stitches. This 3 hour class was a good way to get started and to learn various techniques and also to just sit down and focus for a bit on learning something new. The hand above is what I made in the class. I’m pretty happy with it - I learned quite a bit while making this hand, which employs many different stitch types, and a high frequency of each stitch, so that anyone making it learns the stitch type very thoroughly.
As far as books I have read or flipped through to find techniques and patterns, I have been loving these two: The Royal School of Needlework’s Book of Embroidery and Rachael Dobbins’ Modern Embroidery.
Both of these books are full of ideas with new things to try as well as useful information about traditional embroidery. I found myself reading through Modern Embroidery quite a bit and appreciating the writing and images. One might think with books like this that they are all about the images, but I really appreciated the clear writing in this book. It can be hard to fully understand stitches through writing and images alone (hello youtube!) yet I found myself understanding everything very easily with this book.
One of my favorite patterns I’ve made so far is this one, which I found online by googling “Winter scene embroidery”. I didn’t draw the pattern on this or anything, I just looked at the image on Google and copied it in thread, and put my own spin on a few things here and there.
All of the embroideries pictured here are small except for the hand - they’re about 4 x 4 inches. I am putting each one on my christmas tree this year as ornaments. I think they will be great decorations in the years to come, maybe heirlooms if I am lucky, we will see.
Until next time!