Embroidery experiments
About six months ago, I realized I had a mess of embroidery floss, a hoop, a half-finished beginner project, and no interest in embroidery. So I tossed everything out.
And then, recently, I stumbled across the book Doodle Stitching: Fresh & Fun Embroidery for Beginners, a book that is so adorable in its embroidery that I immediately made the luggage tag in the book and found myself hooked. (See the Flickr pool for the book, here.) I felt goofy for having thrown everything out, though embroidery is an inexpensive hobby, and everything was replaced for around $25. Still, wasteful.
To practice, I decided to do some doodles on the cloth napkins we regularly use. I'm pretty happy with the result, especially this cute little bird I sketched up (based on a design in the book):
I've done three so far, and plan to do at least one more. These are arranged from my first attempt to my most recent:
On the left is my first attempt; it's supposed to be a curlicue or flourish, though it doesn't look as polished as I'd like and photographs even worse. (I swear, it doesn't look like an IUD in person!) The one I finished tonight is the flower on the right, based off a design in the embroidery books I already had. I'd planned to do different stitches for each napkin, but decided I liked the split stitch and the outlining technique quite a lot, so stuck with that.
They'd look a lot better on newer napkins, too; we've had these dark blue ones for a number of years now! I'm contemplating getting some white ones and doing more colorful designs, either of something sweet and simple, such as flowers and birds, or of something goofy, like video game characters.
And then, recently, I stumbled across the book Doodle Stitching: Fresh & Fun Embroidery for Beginners, a book that is so adorable in its embroidery that I immediately made the luggage tag in the book and found myself hooked. (See the Flickr pool for the book, here.) I felt goofy for having thrown everything out, though embroidery is an inexpensive hobby, and everything was replaced for around $25. Still, wasteful.
To practice, I decided to do some doodles on the cloth napkins we regularly use. I'm pretty happy with the result, especially this cute little bird I sketched up (based on a design in the book):
I've done three so far, and plan to do at least one more. These are arranged from my first attempt to my most recent:
On the left is my first attempt; it's supposed to be a curlicue or flourish, though it doesn't look as polished as I'd like and photographs even worse. (I swear, it doesn't look like an IUD in person!) The one I finished tonight is the flower on the right, based off a design in the embroidery books I already had. I'd planned to do different stitches for each napkin, but decided I liked the split stitch and the outlining technique quite a lot, so stuck with that.
They'd look a lot better on newer napkins, too; we've had these dark blue ones for a number of years now! I'm contemplating getting some white ones and doing more colorful designs, either of something sweet and simple, such as flowers and birds, or of something goofy, like video game characters.