Embroidery › Red Instead BLOG

Archive for embroidery

all my hats

Monday, September 3, 2007 @ 5:26 pm
Filed under art, embroidery, sewing

Hi! Are you a new or recent visitor to my blog? I hope you stick around and have a bit of a read. To make it easier to keep up to date with new content, please subscribe to my RSS feed. Of course, feedback is always appreciated and leaving a comment is a great way for me to come and check out your site.

I have been SICK (again!) from Tuesday to Saturday with the a meaty cough and fever but thank goodness I am back to good health again now. I was even so sick that I had to cancel my much anticipated trip to Melbourne to visit my friend Yvie. I booked it two months ago and was SO looking forward to a fun weekend away. That was very sad but I will rebook and go sometime soon.

Anyway, before I got sick there was the Blue Hatters Tea Party to attend. This little event was last Tuesday and was a showcase for the group I am in (Brindabella Women’s Group) for us all to show off the various hats and fascinators we have worked on over this past year.

We have all done some amazing work and really enjoyed working on something a little different.

The Blue Hatters Tea Party was tied in with raising awareness for depression and we had a few guest speakers and activities on the day.

At various sessions held throughout the year we worked on our hats and fascinators, leading up to making a hat that somehow represented depression. After much thought, I decided to make a hat to hide behind - this was the project that I was doing the face embroidery for a little while ago. I titled this one “Put on a happy face” and I envisioned it as a hat that you could hide under when feeling down and unable to face the world.

I did some foundation piecing around the embroidery and topped it off with some ruffles and a button yoyo on top.

My first wearable art piece and I have to say, it does stand out from the crowd just a little bit. Just the thing to put on when you are feeling blue and want to hide away but you have to be out and about.

Permalink Comments

Visited 8163 times

WIP - me embroidered

Tuesday, August 14, 2007 @ 11:49 pm
Filed under embroidery

Here is a look at something I have been mulling over for a couple of weeks now. This is a WIP (work in progress) and it’s actually part of a project that I am working on - I won’t say too much, not because it’s secret and exciting, but simply because I am still forming the ideas in my head and figuring out how to make them work when they are no longer in my head!

This may not even end up as part of the project as it is different to my original idea, but even on it’s own I think it is interesting. Enough ramble, you want to see it, don’t you? I started off with this self-portrait camera-phone photo of me from a couple of months ago:

I then took it into Photoshop and with the help of a couple of filters, I turned it more or less into a line art pic which I then traced onto some homespun cotton and started embroidering!

Interesting, but I thought it needed a bit more so I got out some chalks and pencils and even a Tombow brush pen and added a little bit of colour, drew some hair and filled in the shadows:

This is where it’s at now. Still looking at it and thinking about it. To me, it looks like my face is really wide but I have measured it against the original and the proportions are correct. I think that may be something that could be fixed with some shading to make it look more rounded but I’m not sure.

I’d love to know what you think or if you have any suggestions. This is my first time doing embroidery so I am pretty happy with it. It took a little over two hours to do the stitching. I have a few embroidery books and some supplies and I want to do more of this. I’ll keep you posted with the progress.