Talliaferro Challenge - Part 3

Last week, I had showed you how one petal looked stitched using the couching method.

Liking the look of it, I went ahead and stitched the other side which was a big mistake. The original plan was that the flower would have petals in two shades of red, the darker berry and the bright red you see below. I didn't particularly like the two shades together. I need to learn to do test pieces before I go full speed ahead. I would have realized that they didn't go well together if I had stitched a line of each color side by side.

So out they went. This was slow going.

Fortunately the ground fabric wasn't too affected since I'm stitching on top of felt. I can't say the same for the felt which had to come out.

Since the felt had to come out, I took the opportunity to add an extra layer of felt padding. I did feel that it needed it, so in the end it all worked out :)

Bi-cones were stitched back on with a circle of silver-lined seed beads. As I'm writing this today after having been to the JEC center, I wish I could redo these. I learned the proper way of doing them so they would come out nice and round. Next time :)

Here are my beads all strung up.

I used a pill bottle to control the strung beads but the komas I picked up would have been very useful here.

It's unfortunate the two red shades didn't go nicely together, but it looks great with just one red.

The rest of the petals were stitched like you would a satin stitch, curving along the lines of the felt. To help figure out the angles, I would use a silver Jelly Roll pen to sketch out the lines.

I followed the same stitch all throughout the flower except the center. For this section, I used the leaf stitch technique that was used in De Rose Vêtues.

I really enjoyed stitching the petals. It goes much faster than you would expect as the beads cover more ground than thread. Stitching each petal with beads going in different direction, makes the light hit them at different angles. This makes it sparkle even more.

Renwick Museum

While I was in D.C. last week, my friend Karine took me around to visit the attractions. We saw the monuments at the Mall (i.e. Lincoln memorial, WWII, Vietnam War,...) but we also visited a few museums. One of these was the Renwick museum. Below are a few of the pieces that attracted my attention. I don't know the meaning behind most of them, I just liked looking at them :)

This one is an art installation that was placed in a large room with nothing underneath it so people could lay on their backs and watch the colors change. The piece is made out of netting with fiber optics woven in to give the colors. I can't remember what it represented, but it was very pretty.

There were many fiber pieces, this one is made from crochet doilies.

This one is most likely machine stitched but I love the details in it.

We had to ask a guard what this was. Apparently it's a map of the D.C. area. I think the gray are major government buildings. All the red rectangles represent the houses that were foreclosed. Many of these houses are considered to be in prime locations and worth a lot of money.

I found this "quilt" fascinating. It's made out of tiny microfilms.

A woven piece.

This piece is machine quilted with different "fabric" weights.

Talliaferro Challenge - Part 2

Last post, my Trievaulx Blossom II was all outlined and had some felt stitched onto it.

I bought the felt from the fabric store and suspect it's most likely polyester. Not the same quality as the felt Alison put in her kits. Her's is wool and doesn't tear apart when you're cutting small pieces out. The one I got is painful to use but does the job.

Except for the really small areas, everything  has two layers of felt.

Here it is all covered with the felt.

For this project, I decided to do things properly. I figured I should use all those sketchbooks and markers I've accumulated and actually plan things out before I start stitching. I redrew the motif in pencil and then with markers "colored in" the areas. The key here was figuring out angles and how I wanted the beads to be oriented.

Each dot represents a bead with the black lines going through it representing the thread. I tried to use different techniques in different areas. Doing that will show different sides of the beads, meaning the light will hit it differently giving the piece dimension.

Here is my bead palette. These are 11/0 size beads and I even got some Swarovski bicones and an owlet crystal.

I started with the biggest petals. The bicones are going to be used here, the hard part was finding the center and have them be symmetrical.

The Swarovski bicones are surrounded by a circle of clear silver lined beads. I don't know why, but I kept imagining them there and it wouldn't budge. No one at home, who'd seen them, liked them, but it kept reminding me of the flowers from Alice in Wonderland that could talk ^_^

For the large petals, I wanted to try my hand at couching down strung beads. It's the same technique used in goldwork where you couch down gold pearl purl, but instead of metal threads you have beads. I saw the technique in the Japanese Bead embroidery book I bought last year and wanted to try it out.

The beads are strung on a really long doubled thread that's already been anchored in the piece at the starting point. Once I have all my beads, I used another thread of the same color (single strand this time) and made a stitch every two beads to anchor it down. In some areas, I would stitch in between every bead to get the curve just right.

Once I got to the inner layers, I started stitching from the outside in between two layers. Stabbing at an angle will force the two layers closer to each other leaving no spaces. The hard part was making sure there were no spaces in between the strung beads. I wished I had a pair of komas. I've placed an order for those with the JEC which I'm picking up today since I'm in Atlanta while you are all reading this :) They will be very useful for next time I use this technique.

Here is one petal all stitched up.

Gone Fishing

Right at this moment I'm on my way for the first leg of my vacation in D.C. I'm meeting up with the ladies from the French Needle tour I went on last year. We have lots of sight seeing planned, it should be fun :)

From there I will fly out to Atlanta with my friend Caroline to take classes at the Japanese Embroidery Center for phase I of bead embroidery. I've been planning this trip since October so I'm super excited it's finally time :)

Part two of the Talliaferro Challenge series has already been written and scheduled to come out Wednesday. If you don't want to wait till I get back home to read about my trip, you can follow along on Instagram. See you in a week!

Talliaferro Challenge - Part 1

For those of you who googled SFSND, you might or might not have found something. SFSND stands for San Francisco School of Needlework and Design. The school was founded in 2015 by Lucy Barter (if you've seen Craftsy's Goldwork class, she is the teacher) and Ellice Sperber. Both were students at the Royal School of Needlework and teach all kinds of different embroidery techniques. I'm quite jealous of stitchers in the San Francisco area.

In order to promote embroidery, they started something called the Stitch at Home Challenge. They'll provide the inspiration and the stitcher can then use any needlework technique they want to create a piece. They are currently on their third challenge. This time the inspiration was provided by Talliaferro Classic Needleart who contributed two lovely motifs for us to stitch.

After some thinking I decided to go with Trievaulx Blossom II. I also decided to do it all in beads using some of the things I learned from Alison Cole's class to add some dimension to the piece.

I was limited to what I had in my stash and what I could find at the local fabric shop and bead shop. The fabric I got for the piece is some satin polyester fabric. It has a nice shine to it, but it's such a let down after that gorgeous fabric I was using in Pearl Butterfly. The flower looked a lot like the Turkish tulips on the pottery my parents brought back from their trip to Turkey, so I decided to stick with red, green, blue and white for my color palette.


Since the fabric was very light weight, I decided to back it with some muslin. For transferring the design, I traced it onto the muslin using an archival pen.

I then pinned the muslin to the back of my fabric. From the back, I used tiny stitches to outline the design so it will show up at the front.

I used the colors that each area will be stitched in so that at the end, they will be covered and won't show. Here you can see the shine of the fabric. While stitching, I used a hoop, but I only put the backing muslin in the hoop. That way I could avoid marking the satin fabric. It worked out quite well like that.

Next post I'll share more of what I did with the felt.