Exposition at l'Acienne-Lorette

This year I was invited to exhibit with a group of stitchers from Quebec city who decided to hold an exhibition near Quebec city. It was organized by my friend Patricia of l'Atelier de Pénélope in collaboration with the city of l'Ancienne-Lorette.

As it's only about 3 hours away, I decided to drive down and spend the weekend with Patricia. Three days of nothing but embroidery. Heaven! Patricia has a huge personal library at home and I got to spend lots of time in it. For the exhibition, I brought with me three pieces to submit.

Bouquet from the heart of Japan © JEC

Beaded eyeglass case © JEC

Samara

I thought about bringing a piece of whitework but I figured I'll limit myself to techniques I'm sure no one will have seen.

We had a great turnout as the ladies did an excellent job with advertising, including getting an article printed in the local newspaper. Usually most visitors are friends and families, for this exhibition there were many strangers who had heard about it and decided to drop by. However, there are many still who either couldn't make it or lived too far. So for all those who couldn't come, we made a video. I hope you enjoy it!

(click on the post to see the video below)

As far as my current projects are concerned, I'm still stitching when I have time. Mainly on the mermaids and hedebo piece, I just have less and less time to blog about it. It's come to a point where I will need to start scheduling a time slot for "administrative tasks", as otherwise you'll never see anything here.

June TUSAL

I'm really behind on my posts as things are getting very busy at work. I usually write my posts during my lunch break, which leave more time for stitching when I get home, but recently I haven't been able to take long ones. So I'm going to use this post to both share a picture of my ORT jar and my progress on two of the pieces I've been working on.

Outdoors stitching has started. I'm making some progress on the center motif of my hedebo piece.

During the week, I've been working on my mermaid piece for about half an hour to an hour a day. I've missed my sister's birthday, but I'm pretty sure I'll be able to finish it before the end of the year.

The skin takes forever to stitch as I'm working 1 over 1, so I have double the amount of stitches to put in. To speed things up, I've been practicing two handed stitching. It works really well if the strands is not too long. Now I just need to be able to do the same on non-counted fabric.

(click on the post to see the video below)

Framing with a Shadowbox

As my Goldwork Pineapple is so small and I was on a tight schedule, I decided to frame the piece myself. I definitely wanted protection for my piece which meant some sort of glass, but I didn't want to squish my stitching. The nicer solution would have been to use a frame with double mat to lift up the glass, the easy solution was to use a shadow box. I went to my local Michael's and found a size that would work perfectly. It only comes in a pack of four, but I was able to split it with a friend.

First step is measuring the inside of the frame.

Use those measures to cut out a piece of mat board.

To my shock, my measurements came out spot on. This would be amazing in normal circumstances, but in this case I need something a little smaller to make space for my fabric.

I trimmed the edges on the top and on one side to create that space. Just enough wiggle room for the piece to sit comfortably in the box.

I don't want my embroidery to come out flat, so I glued a piece of batting to my mat board.

I laid my piece on the mat and put the shadow-box over it to get an idea of what it will look like once completed.

At the last minute, I decided to do something I normally never do and that's sign my work. I usually keep the pieces I make so I've never thought of signing any of them. So for the first time ever, one of my pieces is sporting a signature. It's nothing fancy, just my initials and the year. The heart was completely accidental. I put in a line that I had to quickly convert to a heart so it wouldn't look weird.

Next step was the stretching. Luckily the piece is really small and the fabric big so I was able to get this done pretty quick.

Once it's been stretched, it's ready to be popped into a frame.

In my case, I needed something to stick my piece to the back of the shadow-box. I wanted something with a little height to push my piece forward. I found this double-sided tape by Scotch. It's not archival quality and non-toxic. If my piece was embroidered on silk, I would never use this but in this case it was okay.

My piece is ready to be gifted and I even wrote a little message for her on the back. My friend really liked it, I'm happy to say. I have a video of her opening it and I will always remember the look on her face when she got her first look at it.