Stumpwork Initial Finish

Last weekend I had another finish, the Stumpwork Initial! I am so pleased to get this done. It started life as a class at Beating around the Bush in Adelaide, Australia, in October 2009.

In the last post about this project, I had pretty much finished with the flowers. In fact, I had had enough of them. Sometimes you just get tired of a project and have to finish it. Here are the flowers, leaves and two of the butterflies cut out. I thought they looked a bit dingy, so I took a deep breath and washed them in a mixture of laundry detergent and oxygen bleach. Remember, these are all made of silk. The brands I use are Kirkland High Efficiency powder (available only at Costco in the US) and OxyClean. After swirling them around for several minutes I rinsed them in a sieve and set them out to dry in my laundry room.

I think they do look a bit better here, so I stitched them onto the initial.

I'm still not particularly happy with the white flowers, so I think I'll send it off to Bobbi, who runs our local dry cleaning shop and is used to my silk embroidered items. It took me three tries to get the butterfly body right. It's a 20 wrap bullion knot with three strands of cotton floss. It's supposed to have yellow spots on the darker blue portion of the wing, but I forgot to add them.

This is the photo of the original project. You can see I don't have quite as many flowers, as I just got so tired of them.

I haven't quite figured out what to do with it. I'm seriously considering adding a round border and mounting it as a roundel. That will take some doing, but I have an idea of how to go about it. So I guess this project really isn't quite finished, and you may be subjected to another post about it.

Likes and dislikes:
This is a kit and a class by Jan Kerton of Windflower Embroidery in Victoria, Australia. Jan is a delightful teacher, and all of the materials are very high quality. This kit had Madiera, YLI and Gumnuts silk floss, silk fabric, and even silk organza for the base of the cut out shapes. She provided a CD of all the initials, so we can assemble more materials and make any one of the initials. Also included are the materials for making strawberries, blackberries, and a beaded dragonfly.  Unfortunately, she doesn't have a distributor in the US, so if you want a kit you'll need to order from one of the shops in Australia listed on her site. She may be coming to the Koala Conventions in Seattle and Atlanta in 2013, but that is quite a long way off.

The only think I didn't particularly like was that the shapes to be cut out are drawn in black ink. This isn't an issue with the leaves and the butterflies but I had a hard time covering the lines with the while floss.  I have combined the shapes all onto one sheet of paper so I can copy them on to transfer paper, but I will try to lighten the lines first.

I mentioned in one of the previous posts that I want to make one for my granddaughter, and this is still on my list of things to do. Someday.

If you would like to read all of my posts on this project, just click on "stumpwork initial" in the labels cloud and they will all pop up.

Stumpwork Initial Progress

Another prewritten post to keep you all entertained while I'm in London. I've been making slow and unsteady progress on the Stumpwork Initial. As you can see, all of the flowers are finished, except for the centers. I'll do those as I attach them to the initial, as I may stack or overlap some. So I can finish up the petals - those are the heart shaped things in the center, do a few more leaves, then call it quits.

I am beginning to get really, really tired of this project. Embroidering all these flowers, leaves and petals is getting to be extremely tedious. I am so looking forward to cutting all these out and arranging them on the initial.

In my last post I was anguishing about running out of the Gumnuts Stars threads that came with the kit. I had planned on driving to Needlepoints, Ltd up in Garden Grove to replace my dwindling supplies. But then I got there and found they haven't carried this line for over five years! Nor do they carry Madiera silk floss. I was so disappointed. But I managed to get some Au ver a soie, Soie d'Alger in 4147 and 2941, very light and slightly less so pinks. The two flowers just right of center on the bottom are made of these. It's not too bad of a match, and will look fine (I hope) once embroidered in place on the initial.

Color Choices for the Stumpwork Initial

The title sounds like a home decorating show, doesn't it? But I am in something of a quandary concerning the colors for my Stumpwork Initial flowers.

I did manage to complete the embroidery on the initial, and even stitched the vines in whipped running stitch. So that's progress, at least.

But it is the flowers that have me stumped. The kit came with lengths of Gumnut Stars Silk Floss in Pale #010, Medium #013 and Dark #016, all of them in the Watermelon line. They look lovely, but I ran out of the floss as I wanted to make quite a few more flowers than I had floss.

 

This one is made with the Pale and Medium shades, and I think is pretty quite nice, although it could use a bit more filling, which I will add eventually. I did save enough of the floss for that.

The flower on the left is made with Pale and Dark shades, and I'm not sure I like it very much at all. But what really bothers me are the buds, the little heart shaped pieces to the right of the flower. They are made with Madeira stranded silk floss in shade 504. I don't think that this shade of pink matches the Gumnuts shades at all, which has a bit of peachy shade in it.

And here is a flower made with Madeira stranded silk in 2404 beige, and 504 dark pink as shown in the buds above. I don't like it at all, as there is too much contrast between the beige and the dark pink. This will be a flower to stack under another, smaller, flower to hide the contrast a bit.

Just as I was giving up for the night I rummaged around in my silk floss box and found a lighter pink, No. 502, which I think will be a nice transition between the beige and the dark pink. I hope to stitch a few flowers using it and maybe shading it a bit with the darker pink. But even with this lighter shade of pink the flowers stitched with the Madeira silk still don't match those stitched with the Gumnuts Stars. I mentioned before that I plan on making two initials, one for me and one for the lovely granddaughter, so this will give me the opportunity to separate the flowers made from the two brands of threads. Please bear in mind that the differences in shades are only due to what happened to be in the kit and what I have on hand. Gumnuts Stars come in many different colors, some of which may match the Madeira very well. In fact, it looks as though the Sweet Pea group may match what I have just fine, but I don't happen to have them. But luckily for me, on Friday I can zip up to Needlepoints, Ltd in Garden Grove, only 25 miles away, which carries the most of the Gumnuts threads. And I can even visit my mom on the way!

Stumpwork Initial

Lately I've resumed working on my Stumpwork Initial, I started at Beating Around the Bush in October 2009. I'm determined to get this finished and framed.

I have managed to get sidetracked, but in a good way. Instead of making one initial, I've decided to make two, one for me and one for my granddaughter. I'm making the butterflies, flowers and leaves on a double layer of silk organza fused together, and didn't want to waste fabric, so I decided to embroider as many as I could on the square of fabric that came with the kit. I mentioned in the previous post that I ordered some Evertite frames to better use the fabric. These came and as you can see, I've mounted the silk on them. I probably could stand to put a few more tacks in the corners.

These frames are very nice! If you have never come across them, I encourage you to try them. Mary Corbet of NeddlenThread.com wrote a fairly comprehensive article about them, so I won't repeat it here. They are great for this type of application, in which I'm trying to get as much use out of the fabric at hand.

Embroidering these little bits is fairly tedious, so to give myself a break, I'm devoting some time on the initial. You can see the raised part on the left side of the C where I restarted the embroider. I'll "comb" these stitches in and hide any leftover bumps with the flowers.

This view of the underside of the embroidery shows how the design is transferred. Our teacher, Jan Kerton, silk screened the initial backwards onto a piece of muslin. The muslin is then placed under the silk, but not fused to it. We then work a running stitch along the lines, then backfill the running stitch so there is a continuous line of stitches on the silk surface. You can barely see this in the photo of the monogram that is right side up, look at the unfinished curlicue. We then work a whip stitch around the running stitches to give some dimension to the narrow lines. You can see this in the finished portions of the monogram. This is a great way to transfer simple designs, but would became way too tedious and complicated for fussier designs.

I hope to get a few hours of stitching in today. Here in Southern California the weather is lovely, with a high in the low 70s. So I really need to get some gardening time in while the weather is still nice.

Back to Silk Embroidery

Since I've been sewing and crocheting so much lately I haven't been doing much embroidery, and do I ever miss it.  I have finished sewing the blocks together for the black and white quilt, but am undecided on the border. Since I cannot just sit down and decide on a border, but must let myself think about it over the course of several days (sort of a stream of consciousness thing), I decided to pull out an old embroidery UFO and work on it.

This is a stumpwork initial kit from one of my classes at Beating Around the Bush in October 2009. The class was taught by Jan Kerton, a very talented, and I must say, entertaining teacher. For each kit, she photographed our chosen initial that she had worked up. That's an amazing amount of work.  The kit comes with the initial, stem and leaf placement drawn on the muslin, which we place under the silk fabric. We then worked a running stitch through both layers of fabric to transfer the design to the front of the silk. The muslin layer gives a good foundation for the silk fabric and allows the transfer of the design without actually marking the silk. Jan uses this technique with most of her kits and it work quite well.

Here is my progress so far. As you can see, the initial in the kit is slightly different than the original. We put it in the frame with a layer of lightweight interfacing over the silk fabric, then cut out the interfacing to expose the area to be worked. This is a very effective technique to keep the edges of the fabric around the hoop clean. The wide bits of the initial are padded with felt and worked over with raised stem stitch using Madiera stranded silk. The raised stem stitch is really easy and looks great - giving the initial a bit of texture in the very wide areas. Using a padded satin stitch would also work, but as we all know, it is much more time consuming and difficult to get perfect.

I decided to add some butterflies to the initial, and started them here.  These are worked on two layers of silk organza fused together. The design are transferred to the silk as iron on transfers. The right side of the lower butterfly and the flower were done in class where I didn't have my 3X magnifying glass that I use with my extra strong reading glasses, so they are a bit wonky. The left side of the lower butterfly and the middle one are coming along a bit better. I'm hoping that after I fill in the right side a bit more it won't be too bad. These are worked in YLI silk floss, which is extremely fine. We only had a bit of it in the kit, but luckily I had these colors in my stash, so I can make as many butterflies as I wish.

I also started some leaves. These are worked with Madiera stranded silk, which is thicker than the YLI and therefore easier to work with. A bit about the construction: all of the outlines are worked in split stitch, then filled in with buttonhole stitch. With the YLI floss on the butterfly, I found I had some of the fabric showing through, and ended up adding some split stitches in among the buttonhole stitches to give it better coverage.

After I worked on these a bit, I realized that working in the hoop was driving me nuts! So I ordered some nice Evertite slate frames and will attach both pieces to the frames to finish them.

Now that I'm embroidering I feel so much better!