Skip to main content

Stitch Love

February is National Embroidery Month, so I thought I'd share some pics from my stitching archives. Personally I started my embroidering journey with cross stitch, and I still have the very first piece I designed forty years ago:

Thanks to two surgeries on my stitching hand, which left me with only 20% use of it, I never finished that one. I gave up embroidery for a long time while I learned to use my other hand, and that's when I started to quilt. Embellishing quilted pieces with beading, which probably isn't considered embroidery, helped me develop fine motor skills with the hand that still worked. Here's the abstract beaded golden swan ATC from the year I made 1000 trading cards:

As I got more confident I tried to do more with my embellishing, and started (carefully) trying to do freehand hand embroidery. My Pearl girl Victorian crazy tote was the first of that phase:

My first large-scale, self-designed embroidery project was the recycled linen quilt:

While it technically doesn't have a lot of embroidery (just a bit of feather stitching here and there), I'll finish up with the Zen Garden quilt, which I think shows I've grown as a stitcher:

Embroidery isn't a dying art (yet) but most youngsters don't seem to have the patience for it. I wish I had more skill, but I'm happy that I'm still able to do what I do. While the arthritis is eroding what I can do with hand work, I've probably got a few more years left to play. Embroidering the silk crazy quilt blocks this year should let me show off the best of my stitching while I can still do it.

Labels:

Comments

nightsmusic said…
Excluding the first of course, I remember the rest. And that linen quilt is still amazing. And gorgeous! You're a testament to adapting and surviving and such an inspiration to me.
February 9, 2020 at 1:39 PM
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Old Loves & Such

My guy kindly bought me my favorite Chinese take out the other night, and my fortune cookie offered up an interesting story starter: This sounds sweet, right? Only the first thing I thought of was an old love coming back from the dead . . . . must be October. In other lovely news, my favorite hand-dyed thread artist, Lorraine from Colour Complements , is moving her business from Etsy to her own web site. Many of my favorite sellers on Etsy are leaving due to the whole "free shipping" coercion debacle, which has also soured me on the site. To show support I did a little shopping at Lorraine's web site and got in these: I love her threads and trims; you simply can't buy anything like them anywhere. Her work makes my specialty thread box look like a treasure chest: At night I'm spending just as hour working on quilting the scrap project runner, and I'm making slow progress: I'll keep quilting the runner while I try to decide on a design for t...
2 comments
Read more

Love Means This

Invested in a couple of hand-dyed bundles from one of my favorite fabric artists. This one said "Make me into something for Valentine's Day." So I went for a quilted and embellished tote. I kept thinking about what love means to me as I worked on it. Here's the finished tote. Although I was tempted to embellish with beads and pins, I got sick and only felt well enough to do a little stitching every night. As I worked I thought about how often love seems disappointing to us, especially when it fails to live up to our expectations. But now that I've experienced love in many forms, I can say that it's made me a better person than I might have been without it. Love is a precious thing, and should be appreciated in all its forms. I am very grateful for the love of my guy, my child and my friends who have stuck with me all these years. That's you two, in case you're wondering. :) Also finally found something to do with a ve...
1 comment
Read more

Wild Ride

Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds is an epic, dazzling film that hurls you into the Korean version of the afterlife while showcasing some of the most impressive special effects I've ever seen in any movie. The story begins with the death of firefighter Kim Ja-Hong (Cha Tae-hyun) who jumps out of a burning building with a child in his arms. The kid lives, but he dies at the scene. Two strangers inform him that he has passed away right on schedule, and toss him into a vortex that takes him to the world of the afterlife, where he meets his three guardians: Gang-rim (Ha Jung-woo), Haewonmak (Ju Ji-hoon) and Lee Deok-choon (Kim Hyang-gi). At the gates of the afterlife Ja-Hong learns that he is considered a paragon (an exemplary person who lived a noble and self-sacrificing life) and is eligible to be reincarnated -- but there's a catch. First he has 49 days to make it through seven hells in which he will be judged on his sins. His three guardians will help and defend...
Post a Comment
Read more