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My embroidery group met up with another one for a one-day joint embroidery project. The organizers had chosen an image and cut it in sixteen identical pieces. Every participant got one of the pieces, plus a piece of fabric, and would spend the day embroidering their part – without having seen the whole picture. At the end of the day we’d put the pieces together and see what we’d made.<\/p>\n
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My puzzle piece had a clearly distinguishable motif – the back of a baby’s head – which made my task easier than some of the others’. It also had large fields of colour, including a strong black, which would take forever to fill with just stitches. I have filled large swathes of fabric with stitches<\/a> before, and it did take forever, but this time we only had the one day. I decided almost immediately that I’d take the applique shortcut.<\/p>\n After six hours (with a short break for lunch) I had made good progress. The clothes were there, and the baby’s ear, and the black background was stitched down decoratively, though you can’t really see the black-on-black stitches in the photo. Still definitely not done, though: the cheek and the hair are a single beige blob, and that won’t do. <\/p>\n I was further along than some of the others, who’d taken a more purist, stitch-oriented approach. The arrangers admitted that they had perhaps been overly ambitious. A similar project that they were inspired by ran over a whole weekend (though in parallel with talks and workshops etc) and the puzzle pieces were maybe a third of the size of these. We’ll all have to finish our pieces at home and hand them in later.<\/p>\n When we first laid out the pieces side by side, the picture made no sense whatsoever. Had we messed something up? Then we realized that the A, B, C, D markings had been written on the backs of the pieces, and needed to be laid out as D, C, B, A. And an image emerged: a mother with a sleeping baby in her lap.<\/p>\n![](\"\/helen\/blog\/images\/daily_5\/4264_joint_embroidery_3.jpg\")
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