Occasionally I have comments from people wanting to know more about the embroidery examples in my books, The Left-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion and The Right-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion. People seem to want to know the story behind them.
For those of you who are familiar with my historical whitework books, seeing my stitch dictionaries for the first time might have given you a shock. What? Yvette does COLOUR too? Yes, Yvette loves colour!
I wanted each stitch to have an “inspirational” photo, to show readers an example of ways the stitch could be used. I decided that I wanted the book to be bright and colourful, to attract a wider audience than the whitework books. Colour does attract many people – it certainly attracts me too! And so I set about finding suitable fabric to stitch on. I quickly settled on mostly using the lovely hand-dyed felt from Colour Streams. The colours were vibrant, and I also enjoyed working on the felt surface.
The threads I used included a very wide range, but the main ones were DMC Color Variations floss, and various pearl cottons. I also used some silk, some wool, and some rayon. There were a mixture of solid colours and overdyes.
Each stitch example was created specifically for the space that they occupy in the book. When I did the layout of the book (I’m actually a book designer by training), I allocated spaces for the embroideries to go, and created custom embroideries to fit. What you see is pretty much the entire sample, except for a border of about 1-2mm around the edge that has been cropped. (The ones shown above, though, are only little snippets of those images.)
I loved playing around with the stitches, seeing how far I could push them. I particularly liked the challenge of working stitches in a circle. I’ve always loved circles!
When working the designs, I used the fabric to guide my stitch placement. I looked at the changes in colour across the fabric. The changes looked to me like contour lines on maps. These imaginary lines formed guide lines for me to stitch along or to stitch between. In this way, I built up coloured stitching on the coloured fabric.
It was a joy to work the samples for the book. I was only just coming out of a long and serious illness when I wrote the book, and the whole book was a complete joy to do. The colours were uplifting, but playing with so many new stitches was also a lot of fun.
I was looking through the photos the other day while working on preparing the images for my stitch dictionary app. I was surprised to see how lovely they all look together as an album. All the lovely colours did look quite wonderful together.
If you have further questions about the embroidered stitch samples, please don’t hesitate to ask.
White Threads is the blog of Yvette Stanton, the author, designer, publisher behind Vetty Creations' quality needlework books and embroidery products.
The samples are very inspiring to look through when I’m trying to find “just the right stitch”.