crewel embroidery

[elizabeth_mn]

Well, I was waiting for something to inspire me, and it has.

I picked up Jane Rainbow's Beginners Guide to Crewel Embroidery at the used book store about a year ago. It explains a lot of things in a way I haven't been able to understand from other books. It really made me want to experiment with the soft shading, or 'long and short' stitch. The stitch is explained so well that it went from seeing terrifyingly hard to relatively achievable.

I dug up a reddish 5 x 7 picture frame I got a the thrift store a while ago, measured the visible area, and sketched a simple floral design based on one in the crewel book. I picked up a bunch of Paternayan wool few months ago when I started thinking about shading stitches, so I already had groups of close shades in various colors. I really wanted to use pink, but the orange and red looked better with the red frame.  I'm stitching on a white linen scrap.

I thought the stitch would be similar to working satin stitch: picky and difficult to get smooth. It's not. It's so easy! It's simple and you can cheat anywhere. The only part where it is like satin stitch is keeping the edges even.  Rainbow's best advice is "don't try to find the ends of the short stitches, but rather come up where you would like to see a stitch."

Anyway, I am having so much fun with it that I can't keep my hands off it and I am totally ignoring everything else.  It's not perfect (I think my shades are a little too close) but I am loving the way it looks and I want to get a photo of it soon.