How'd I learn to do it??

Beth asked how I learned to do the stuff I'm doing on Green Mars. Sounds like a great topic for a blogpost.

Most of the embroidery items on this piece are very simple embroidery stitches. There is cross stitch, feather stitch, French knots and couching; maybe some chain stitch. Some simple wrapping stitches were used to create the spiderweb flower forms.

There are several places to find these stitches online:

Sharon B. has a wonderful online Dictionary of Stitches for Hand Embroidery and Needlework and The British Embroidery Guild has a fabulous website where you can find stitches and projects. The stitches are the foundation, the projects give one ideas how to use them. A lot of my inspiration comes from Encrusted Calico.

Many of the beads were simply applied like you'd bead anything... though I'll admit there are patches of beads where a strand of 5-10 are woven or braided before the end is sewn down. Don't know if I read that anywhere or just decided that that's what needed to be done to get the proper texture.

I'm almost done with the base level of embroidery.. will have paths of French knots to run through the piece and more spiderweb flower clusters to add, but the next step is to do some more of the beading. I want it to repeat some of the look of stuff I've done with simply thread (beading is just stitching with an extra step of stuff, IMHO).

So I've gotten inspiration from lots of places, but I'm not sure that I LEARNED how to do this from any one. Given that I have 5 (five??) pieces that are waiting for hand work to be done on them, I think this is something that my soul has created.

So what questions arise from reading this?

Tags: Embroidery, beading, fiber art