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Thursday, May 10, 2012

RSN Crewel: Day 1

Getting ready to stitch:
 After tracing my final design onto heavy tracing paper (vellum weight), I pricked holes following all the lines.  
 
  Below is the finishing pricked design.


Then you align your pricked design on top of your fabric to be embroidered and rub charcoal through the holes.

  Finally, I went back over the charcoal dots with a Prismacolor pencil.



Next:  Looming up
 I stitched the folded edges (top and bottom) to the webbing on my brand new frame,

sewed webbing down the sides,

strung the sides with heavy cotton string through the webbing, and pinned tracing paper over the areas that I was not going to be working for the moment.  Now to the stitching!!!!!!!


Progress at end of Day 1:
Started the trunk of my Tree of Life using a combination of stem stitch and French knot rows stitched tightly beside each other in 4 different shades of grey.



Tuesday, March 13, 2012

More Sketches for My RSN Crewel Embroidery Composition

I'm doing the crewel embroidery module with Tracy Franklin in Durham, England this summer.  I have taken a couple courses with Tracy before and they have been amazing!  After some great feedback from her from the first set of sketches, I have tried to simplify my design a bit and create some larger spaces for stitch techniques.  Honestly, I still need to work on these as I think they could be simplified even more.  I'm still not quite happy with these, so I'm going to sketch some more.  However, here is the direction I'm going.  The actual size for each of them would be 8"x12". 




Monday, March 12, 2012

Crewel Embroidery Samples

So this weekend, I started stitching samples of crewel embroidery techniques.  Each block is a 2"x2" square and I've been alternating trellis patterns with motifs so far, though I can't promise I won't change this going forward.  I just found that I was drawn to a number of the trellis patterns that I saw though researching and thought it would be too busy and heavy if I did straight blocks of trellis alternatives.  








This also brings me to an important note about my research.  Here are the books I have found most useful so far:


Here is a link to a review from The Unbroken Thread Blog.