Last year I got into embroidery, which I haven’t done much of since my high school days. But since then, the only thing I can remember embroidering was a shirt done for a project at the college nearly 20 years ago which asked us to come up with a design that will let our elderly teacher fit into a shirt that his young bride brought him from Jakarta. While most students designed some sort of corsets that will slim the teacher down to be able to fit in shirt that was too small, my project was called Brand New Shirt, and I recreated the shirt in larger size. My mom sewed it together and brought me embroidery floss, which I still have and which reminded me I had to get some more colors – and so I did. At that point, I couldn’t resist trying to draw with embroidery floss just like I doodle in sketchbook with Sakura Micron pens – this is now cotton on cotton drawing. I start with just a general idea of what I’m going to do, but no preliminary drawings or designs are made to be traced onto a fabric.
The navy shirt had the most involved design stage, yet it wasn’t done before the work began – rather, it occurred at the middle of embroidery process. The video below comes from Autodesk Sketchbook app for Android: I took a picture of my work, brought it into Sketchbook and sketched out some design ideas, trying to figure out how to finish the piece. The embroidery work done until the point of taking the photo was minimally assisted with white pencil, but since embroidery is much slower than drawing, it lends itself nicely to exploration without any laid down design, at least for the smaller elements.
Finally, here’s the last embroidery project that I completed months ago: another pillowcase. This was done the same way, with beads being omitted so as to not cause discomfort. Notice the lack of an overall structure in the design: that is simply the drawback of this method of gradually filling up the canvas with designs as I go along. The white colored pencil was also used here to block in larger shapes. However, putting down larger portion of the design in white pencil isn’t useful, because as the fabric is worked on the pencil fades off and becomes barely visible or completely gone. For lighter fabric it’s possible to transfer a design with black carbon paper, which I may try to do with the remaining two pillowcases that I have yet to make.
