Finished the embroidery on the long black cardigan. Even took the time to sew down all the ends with sewing thread so that I can allow it to flap open and the inside to become visible without being embarrassed about it.

Just after finishing it, I couldn’t decide whether it was done or needed more. Should I go over each line again, doubling its thickness, to give it more oomph? Adrian suggested adding leaves to the vines.

Now that it’s rested for a while (I’m catching up with the blog two weeks later) I do like the way it came out. It’s hitting just the right balance between restraint and wildness.

Simple stem stitch all the way, with wool thread. Two threads held together, of different colours, so the colour shifts slightly with each stitch. Greens at the bottom, fading to yellows in the middle and oranges and reds towards the top.

Today is World Embroidery Day. No more basement cleaning – I spent the whole day embroidering.

I have this long black cardigan that I bought online, second hand, a few years ago. Great quality, 100% wool, fits me perfectly – but it is so black. I’m not sure if I’ve worn it a single time, because I feel so dull and boring and washed-out in it. The plan has been for several years now to add colour to it, and I even had an idea for how that would look. I just hadn’t gotten around to it.

That wide unused space in the middle of my bedroom? Turned out to be a great place for planning and sketching out a large embroidery project. Spread it out without running out of table space; walk all around it without navigating around chairs and other furniture. I rather like working on the floor.

I was going to take a photo and then scribble on it digitally, but it was easier to “sketch” using contrasting sewing thread on the cardigan directly, and then take a reference photo of that.

Then I got stitching! Enjoyed stitching for the whole day, and was done with half of my design by the end of it.

Closing session for the embroidery club for this season, with a mini-exhibition and a potluck meal.

I almost managed to finish mounting my work in time, but gave up at midnight yesterday and left the last bits until later.

All done with the Stockholm embroidery! Needs better lighting to do it proper justice, though.

Staple guns are strangely satisfying to work with.

Working on my green organza tetraptych, hoping to get it to a presentable state in the week that’s left before our embroidery club’s last meet-up of the season. It would feel nice to have it finished. (The Stockholm embroidery will be fully finished and mounted this weekend, as soon as I get my delivery of linen backing fabric.)

I like embroidery projects where I can let the design emerge as I go. I have an overall concept or idea, but no detailed design sketches. I do a bit, let that marinate, do a bit more, look at what I have and consider what more might be needed. An incremental, intuitive approach. Sometimes I don’t even have a real plan for what I’ll do with the yarn I’ve threaded my needle with. I just know that there will be something with this yarn in roughly this area. Only when I have it in my hands and start stitching does the design coalesce.

Sometimes the yarn or the fabric decides the details. When my hank of green thread ends, then that’s where the couching ends. When I want a piece of the silk fabric, if I have an existing scrap piece with roughly the right characteristics, then I take that, instead of imagining some sort of ideal and trying to find it in a larger piece – and the scrap piece can then set the tone for its surroundings.

A deadline was exactly what was needed. I had all the materials – all I needed was a nudge, and a whole lot of patience.

First: pinning. With lots and lots of pins. Note to self: don’t try to do this wearing a knitted sweater, because those pins catch on everything.

Stretched and pinned to a sheet of foam board, it’s already looking nice:

Lacing it from the reverse side.

You really don’t want any knots in the lacing thread, because they make it near impossible to tighten the lacing, so I ended up working with 5-meter pieces of thread. Trying to keep them from tangling was an exercise in patience.

It reminded me of an old Estonian folk tale, where Clever Hans and Old Nick were both going to sew something. Probably Hans challenging Old Nick, as he often did. Old Nick had thick and clumsy fingers, so he asked Hans to thread a needle for him. Hans threaded his own needle with a normal length of thread. For Old Nick, he first gave a very short piece, and when he complained, gave him a very long piece so he had to run back and forth across the yard for each stitch. I felt like old dumb Nick with my long piece of thread here.

Even with all my stretching and blocking, there’s a tiny bit of puckering in the blue background fabric. It’s only noticeable with the light coming from the side and putting the puckers in relief. When it’s hanging on the wall, I’m sure it won’t even be noticeable. For the photo at the top, I turned it with the long edge towards the window, and that already made a difference.

Now I want to frame it on a green background fabric. That’ll be a project for next weekend, when the fabric has arrived.

My Stockholm-themed embroidery has been finished, more or less, since a burst of concerted effort ahead of the workshop at the end of March. Since then I’ve been working with the printed fabrics we made in that workshop, and the Stockholm piece has been languishing in a bag.

The embroidery club has its last session for the season in two weeks, and we vaguely discussed that we should bring the works we’ve finished this season, show them off a little bit.

Realizing that I haven’t actually finished anything, I set myself a new deadline. I will finish mounting the Stockholm piece, and I will make an effort to finish and mount the green prints plus organza series as well.

Step one: block and stretch the piece. It turns out that, even though I had a grid to work off, it’s somehow become slanted nevertheless. Fitting it into a rectangular frame like this would be difficult.

Thus, step zero point five: add a narrow wedge of bushes and walls and water to the edge to square it off. It doesn’t blend in 100%, especially the shadow on the water, but nobody’s going to be looking that closely at the edges.

Continuing with my tetraptych of organza over hand-printed green fabric. Trying out different ways of layering the organza. The first one was a flat layer of organza over printed silk; on the second I tried folding the organza; on the third one I bunched it up and stitched it down more randomly. Photos really don’t do that one justice.

I think the silk needs to make a come-back in the fourth one, to bring it all together, and the purple could be more present in #2 and #3, for the same reason. And they all need a bit more in general (possibly with the exception of the first one).

Finished the organza-over-silk-over-print embroidery. Still not in love with it, but it’s better.

I think the original idea has promise, though, so there will be more attempts. This was one quarter of a larger square of printed fabric. I think I’ll make variations on the theme of the other three quarters, and then perhaps frame them all together.

Today I learned that tetraptych is a word.

Day two of our weekend textile workshop with Lena Larsson. Yesterday we printed on fabric; today we’re embroidering on our printed fabrics.

Lena uses a lot of applique in her embroidery, and she has a particular technique for this that I haven’t run across in anyone else’s work. During the first half of the day I experimented with her technique. She puts a layer of thin, translucent fabric such as organza or tulle on top of her printed fabric, and then sets applique pieces between these two layers. Then she stitches along the contours of the applique pieces. So the applique pieces are not actually sewn to the fabric – they’re only held in place by the contouring stitches. They almost hover in place.

I tried light green organza over a fabric with plenty of green, strips of patterned silk in between, and couched contours. I liked the technique, but I think my fabric choice wasn’t the best. I thought green and purple would give me vibrant contrast, and they would have, if they had been side by side – but the green organza on top of the purple silk strips just made them look washed out and muddy. I tried bringing back some of their colour with embroidery, but I still don’t like the look.

After lunch I switched techniques and experimented with stacking layers of tulle on top of each other, and embroidering on that.

Ten people, all given the same materials and instructions, ended up with ten very different results.