Getting ready to start working on the Stockholm-themed embroidery at the embroidery club tomorrow. I haven’t done much figurative embroidery, but why not try.
Just choosing something to represent Stockholm was hard. I wanted a concrete picture of Stockholm, not something symbolic (like the subway map). I wanted something personal but also general: an image that would be clearly recognizable as Stockholm by not just me (not a view of our house, for example) but at the same time I don’t want a generic postcard.
In the end I settled on using this old photo of mine of Karlberg. The combination of earth-toned buildings, water, and greenery all together feel like quintessential Stockholm to me.
The group’s suggested end date for the project is mid-May. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be done by that time. The marked area on the fabric is 30 by 45 cm. I get a lot for free from the background fabric – I won’t be embroidering much on the sky or the water – but that’s still quite a lot of fabric to cover with stitches. But I’d rather make something that I can be proud of, perhaps even hang on a wall, than focus on a deadline. If it takes me until Christmas – well, then it does.
[…] No more and no less. I want a predictable rhythm, and I don’t want to overdo it one day and then not want to pick up the work the next day. A HSL of DMC embroidery floss yields about 3 square centimetres of embroidered surface. I have about 90 cm2 of trees left, which will take me a month at this pace. Then I’ll have a few weeks to fill in the glimpses of street and car and railroad, and the dark reflections of the trees in the water. Those will both be less dense and far less monotonous than the trees and should hopefully go faster. (Original image here.) […]
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