Right, hello, this is my first blog so please be kind. For those of you that have seen my Folksy site you will know that I hand embroider wild flowers into pendants. I stumbled on this idea back in April 2012. I have always enjoyed embroidery although I have never been trained. I have learnt a great deal along the way, however, trained embroidery artists may shudder at some of my techniques.
I first started with the idea of doing larger embroideries and turning them into cushions, I began with the design for a bramble, four months later I finished the above piece. I loved it but as a business idea it just wasn't going to work, I would have to charge hundreds to make any kind of money; and then to spend all that time on a piece only to stitch it into a cushion and have someone sit on it made me cringe. No, I consider my work art and it should be shown off as such.
And so I started getting smaller and smaller until I had the idea that a piece could be worn on a chain and shown off, a pendant that could say something about the person wearing it. So the large bramble design was adapted and sketched to this:
The sketch showed the bramble through it's different phases. At this stage I was still working with cotton thread on silk material, and this was the result:
I was pleased with this pendant but after I had emailed the embroidery artist Helen M Stevens to ask for her advice she suggested I work with silk thread. So, I bought a starter set of fine silk floss from Pipers and was over the moon with the result:
The detail was so much finer and, while slippery, the silk floss was so nice to work with. This piece attracted a lot of interest and was sold recently. Last week I started sewing a new one but adapted the colours slightly and worked on the curve of the stem. I finished it today, stood back and admired...
Yeah baby!
