New Project!

Thanks to my wonderful friend Sadie, I have a new project!  Sadie is one of my oldest friends - I've technically known her since 6th grade, but I don't remember meeting her until high school.  We hung out all of the time - and because we were such good kids back then, most of it was playing card games at Sherie's or at grocery stores. 

Sadie is an awesome, dedicated, driven person, and since (like a lot of us) she doesn't find a good outlet for that in her work, she organizes bouts for her local roller derby club.  I think that is AWESOME.  I'm a huge fan of things that allow women to get a little aggression out every now and then, and don't assume that we're all delicate little flowers.

...she wrote in her blog about embroidery.  Anyway.

This is an interesting project for me, because I've never taken a logo and tried to translate it directly onto cloth before.  I try to be precise, but I'm more aware than anybody that this medium isn't made for crisp, precise lines.  Just look at the flower/gear project - not one of those shapes is 100% round. 

Hopefully, that blurring effect won't make this look shabby.

Here is the Bellingham Roller Betties logo - in all of it's crisp, original glory (yay, Google Image search!).

Here is the image Sadie sent me to make the template from.  I wanted something bigger than the picture above so that I could start with something that was large enough to look good on the project, rather than get everything perfect on a small picture and then lose detail when I made it larger.

And here is a photo of the image after I made a black outline of it in Photoshop and traced it onto the cloth.  I don't know why it looks so red - the cloth is black, I swear.  

This s going to need a lot of adjustment on the clost, I can tell.  I don't think that the bottom lines are so slanted in real like - they are laid on an uneven surface which is making them bend.  I will probably have to pull the N in Bellingham up a little bit, though, and do some more work to even out Roller Betties, although personally I like how the letters undulate.

In any case, I hope that I'll be able to actually keep this up to date week by week as I make progress.  I am really exited about this - I think that it will be an interesting challenge.

Expect more cruddy pictures from my phone's camera in the future!

My last Two Projects - Or: More Fun to Do than Write About

Hello!

Well, guess who decided to completely abandon this blog...again.  In the interest of maybe (possibly) making this space somewhere I can track my progress as I work on something, I'm going to post about my last two projects at once, rather than giving them their own space.

 After finishing the pillow for my Grandma, I decided to make one for my mother-in-law.  Why my mother-in-law and not someone whose genes I share?  Two reasons.  First, her birthday was coming up next (it's in April).  Second, she is also an avid craftsperson.  She has all of these really cute cross stitched saying in frames around her house, like "Aren't you just a ray of Fucking Sunshine?".  She calls them her Gothic Granny collection.  It's pretty adorable.  So when I started getting better at doing these projects, I thought sending one to a kindred spirit would be the way to go.

I think of this pillow as representing the four seasons.  Each of the outside knots, which I think of as snowflakes or flowers, represents a season, and time flows between them, connecting them in a cycle.  Susan is very interested in paganism and witchcraft, so I figured something more abstract like this would fit with her decor.

As with my first project, I definitely learned a lot on this.  First, I figured out how to do the circular celtic knot that is the background.  The basics for drawing a woven knot like that are in one of the links in my last post, but getting it to bend correctly was a chore.  Second, I learned that knots look much better if they have a bold outline. 

To see what I mean, compare this
image, which is meant to represent
Spring...

to this one, which is meant to represent Summer.

The spring knot is definitely my least favorite of the set.  I picked the colors because they seemed reminiscent of new grass and the first few buds on trees, but they are all too similar and too pale.  They look more like the winter knot, which is all blues and whites.  The summer knot, on the other hand, has a nice dark outline, and a darker color in the middle.  The strands are much more visible because of that.  Since these knots take a long time to draw, having their complexity highlighted is really nice.

You can also see in these pictures that each of the knots is slightly different.  That is because at this point I didn't have a light table, so I made a paper form and traced it, like I did for my Grandma's pillow.  Because I didn't want to have to move the pattern, I drew a separate knot for each corner, and they each came out a little different.  (I watched My Cousin Vinny while I was doing all of this...good times).

Overall, this was a much more successful project than the first one.  You can see that it is closer to being a true square, and I was able to put the slit in the back so that a pillow form can be inserted.  It took a little longer to do (January through April instead of October through December), but I think that it is a much more finished design.

Now, on to my most recent completed project.  This one was a birthday / Christmas gift for my Mom.  

She has a BA in Mechanical Engineering, which she never got to use because someone just had to be born in 1984 and screwed up all that book larnin'.  She doesn't seem to hold it against me, and also seems to enjoy her current career in Real Estate, so everything is good. 

I wanted to do something other than celtic knots with this project, to see if I could do something more literal.  I also wanted to learn a few more stitches since everything I had done so far had been border stitch, chain stitch and back stitch.

Overall, I'm very happy with how this project came out.  I wanted to do flowers, but have them be reminiscent of gears, and I think I succeeded.  At first I thought I would use watch works as the basis, but the amount of overlap in an actual watch turned me off.  Even though this wouldn't actually do anything if it were gears, I like that the design is so clean.

For posterity's sake (or my sake when I want to know how the heck I did this), I'm going to list the types of stitch I used on each flower.

• The petals of the sunflower are outlined in border stitch and filled in with cross stitch.  I didn't want to draw in all of the x's, so I did those freehand (with varying amounts of success).
• The center of the sunflower is chain stitch.  I used one strand each of black, brown and tan, and stitched it in a spiral starting at the outside and working in.
• The rose is outlined in border stitch and filled in with chain stitch, but on this flower each row of chain stitch starts at the outside of the petal and ends at the inside.  There are a lot of knots in the back, but all of the chains point the same direction.  The leaves on the rose are done with fishbone stitch.
• The pink flower (which I modeled after a flowering bush on the UW campus) is outlined in border stitch and filled in with satin stitch.
• The daisy is all back stitch. I like how it feels because it is very flat.  I kind of wish I had done a yellow instead of a black center, but it looks all right like this.
• The thistle is french knots in the middle, and the stems are outlined in border stitch, the yellow is fern stitch, and the green is chain stitch.
• The corn flower has bullion knots for the center and satin stitch for the petals.
• The buttercup is outlined in border stitch and filled in with laid stitch.
• The queen anne's lace is all french knots.

So of all the stitches, border stitch was still used the most.  It's name says it all, though - it's meant to be used for borders.

Overall, I am very happy with this project.  It went much slower than anything else I've done, but it is also much more dense and has more stitches.  I don't think I'll rush to do another project that is all circles, though.  You can see that rose and thistle especially are not perfectly round.  All in all it looks pretty nice, though, and my mom is happy with it (or so she says) so that's all that matters.


Hopefully this one long post wasn't too daunting.  I have a fancy new phone that has a camera in it, so maybe that will help me update more often.  I'm working on a little project just to keep in practice now, so hopefully it won't take too long.  I've recently started playing Star Wars:  The Old Republic, which is really cutting into my embroidery time.

Let me know if you have any advice or comments!  Cheers!