What Are You Working On? is for all things hand-made, home-made, and creative in a variety of mediums.
One of my focuses on creative endeavors is combining embroidery with quilting. This is frequently done in crazy quilts, but I want to move past that. I’d like to do some crazy quilts that tell stories, but that’s another diary. I’m taking an advanced embroidery class that meets the last Tuesday of the month about an hour away. It mostly focuses on wool applique with embroidery enhancements.
The first project we worked on was a sunflower. Three layers of petals with different embroidery.
The stitches accenting the bottom two layers on the flower are pistil stitches and the top layer has an arrow stitch. For all layers, I’ve attached the colored wool to the base wool with 1 strand of embroidery floss to match, or be slightly lighter, than the top piece of wool I’m attaching. I used a whip stitch to attach the wool Many times a blanket stitch would be used, but for this project that would be too distracting. That was my opinion and the instructor’s, so that was good.
A pistil stitch is just elongated straight stitch with a French knot at the end. The arrow stitch is basically two long arms going to a common center point.
I will probably put this into a throw quilt I am making for my sister. This is 5” but I will add a border to make is 6”. All squares for that quilt are either 6” or 12”. Adding this to the throw quilt wasn’t something I was thinking of at first, but if my sister likes it, I will add it.
The piece below is from the pattern for the the throw quilt. I am working on learning more ribbon embroidery stitches and I changed some aspects of this design to more stitches. The pattern doesn’t have any leaves, but I might change that.
I’m not going to go into all the stitches used here as that would take up a lot of text. This is more an idea of what you can do to add embroidery to a square. (yes, it does need ironing).
What do people think? Is there a place for embroidery as part of quilting beyond crazy quilts?
What Are You Working on?