Embroidery Book 2, 2022, Pages 3-4
Piglet and Pooh (as illustrated by E. H. Shepard) were made as needlelace, and the ladybird is a button. I decided to put them in the Hundred Acre Wood.
Piglet and Pooh (as illustrated by E. H. Shepard) were made as needlelace, and the ladybird is a button. I decided to put them in the Hundred Acre Wood.
This is a page illustrating Trubloff, from John Burningham's Trubloff: The Mouse who wanted to play the Balalaika. This is embroidery onto felt, which was then attached to the book page. I've put Trubloff on a background of fabric with musical notes, because he's thinking about the music he wants to play on the balalaika. I made his instrument too, of course.
The tiger from The Tiger Who Came to Tea by Judith Kerr and the cat which appears right at the end of the book and isn't really mentioned, but I think it's significant that it's all stripey and orange. It made me wonder if the girl had seen the cat earlier and then imagined or dreamed that it was a tiger coming to tea.
The illustrators are listed here (and I'll give the dates of the books):
The mouse is from Noela Young's John: The Mouse Who Learned to Read but having the mouse do some embroidery's my idea. Here's the mouse before I attached it to the page.
The word "Wild" is stitched in fly stitch, with little yellow flowers added in. The bird is from Graham McCallum’s 4000 Animal, Bird and Fish Motifs.
The original image of the zebra came from the archives of Pearson Scott Foresman, donated to the Wikimedia Foundation. I thought it would be interesting to use the fabric as part of the body, without any outer lines to the figure, though the shape's obvious from where the stripes start and stop. I used Turkish Rug stitch for the hair on the nape of the zebra's neck, and its tail is also made up of threads which hang loose.
I'd been experimenting with making embroideries which are freestanding (i.e. not sewn onto a large piece of background cloth) and are a bit more three dimensional. I think, technically, this is called "stumpwork." This is a lamb adapted from various heraldic images of the agnus dei and, particularly helpful with the textures, this photo. It's almost 7cm high and 7cm across.
I made quite a few mice this year, but I was particularly pleased with how I managed to contour such a tiny face, using layers of wadding on the surface before I began stitching (1-stranded cotton) "fur". The whiskers are stiff Gutterman linen thread.