White Threads

In recent times I’ve been corresponding with Rachel of VirtuoSew Adventures. You may have known Rachel from her previous designing venture known as Racheland Designs. She took a break from the embroidery design world, and is now back. Our gain! Today I’d like to introduce you to Rachel.

How did you start doing embroidery?
I was looking for a hobby that wouldn’t involve my parents in a lot of ferrying me around, and found a transfer in my mother’s box of dress patterns, together with some embroidery floss and fabric. I used all sorts of ornamental stitches because I thought I would get bored of satin stitch and long and short stitch, and I have always had a bit of a thing about finishing stuff. It doesn’t stop me having unfinished projects, but it generally stops me starting something when I know I will hate it!

How did you start designing embroidery?
I think the first piece I designed was a combination of an idea from one project and the motifs from another. I embroidered some rather lavish folk-inspired flowers onto some non-woven interfacing and applied it to a jumper.

I worked this in my first University summer vacation. I had found a summer job in an office, which wasn’t thrilling, and did this in the evenings for a change.

The jumper is a simple crew necked, long sleeved affair knitted using several yarns as one. It’s really not a good quality piece, but I was an impoverished student and that was the best I could do. The motifs, and the idea of putting embroidery on a jumper, came from a book called “French Style Embroidery” which I had recently bought.

The motifs are a variety of Jacobean and Middle European design elements, which I put together in my own way. I embroidered the design on non-woven interfacing using wools, soft embroidery cottons and stranded cottons in autumnal colours. The non-woven interfacing shredded and went thin in some places, and completely non-existent in others, so when I attached the embroidery to the jumper with seed stitches I also put seed stitches on the jumper where there would have been interfacing if it had survived the embroidery phase!

I’ve worn this jumper most winters since then. It simply gets thrown in the washing machine when it gets dirty (turned inside out) and so the wool has felted a bit, and if I am honest, the jumper itself needs to be restyled, because it really wasn’t manufactured with a twenty-year lifespan in mind.

But it almost invariably gets a (favourable!) comment from someone…!

Do you have any particular influences? People, styles etc?
Actually, my Grandmama started it all. She was a skilled and enthusiastic embroideress, who tried all sorts of techniques and styles. There are three or four rugs she made which are still in the family, all the bedlinen was embroidered, she did a fantastic whitework tablecloth, and when I finally picked up embroidery all on my own, she encouraged me every stitch of the way until she died three years later. That eclectic mix of styles and techniques is very much my own approach as well. I try to match the technique to the subject, rather than twisting the subject to match a technique I want to employ.

Grandmama started me working on this when I was about eight or nine, using a spare piece of double thread canvas she had lying around, and some spare embroidery floss. It took ages to do because it was intended to be a present for my mother, so we could only work on it when I was staying with Grandmama and Grandad!

The large holes in the canvas made it relatively easy to keep straight what was meant to be straight, and Grandmama drew a very simple flower spray and butterfly for the main motif. Notice that the butterfly is worked in a blend of the flower colours! The frame around the edge is in cross stitch and half cross stitch, and the background is in brick stitch.

I finally finished it – both of the side panels, blocked, lined and made up – when I was eleven, in a sewing class at school. Then I don’t think I embroidered again until I was fifteen, at which point I became hooked.

But really, I think this is where it started.

Are there any particular styles or techniques of embroidery that you especially like working within?
I love the variety of stitches and colours to be found in Jacobean work, and tend to take the variety a step further by playing with textured and overdyed threads as well. I know that there is a slight risk of overdoing the colour and texture, but so far I have usually managed to get the balance close to right even if it isn’t perfect.

How would you describe your embroidery style?
Exuberant! Colourful! Adventurous!

What do you love about embroidery?
I love the combinations of colour and texture; I love the concentrated effort that is needed to develop the skill; and I love the way I can get lost in the world I am creating by my stitchery.

Do you have any favourite stitches? Why?
Braid Stitch, because it’s less complex to stitch than it looks; Heavy Chain stitch, because it makes a beautiful contrast with the textures of threads and stitches, and creates a smooth, clean line; Battlemented couching, because… actually I don’t know why, I just love it!

Here is one of the elements of my Jacobean Firescreen, showing the Battlemented Couching I used to fill in the fruit. It needs to be worked in a hoop to make sure that the fabric remains stable and the threads aren’t pulled too tight. Essentially it consists of four grids of long stitches, each slightly offset from the last. The final layer is held down by small stitches at the crossing points, so it is a much more controlled filling than it first appears during the early stages of making it. I’m very fond of Battlemented Couching, but I can’t for the life of me work out why!

The fruit is outlined in Pekinese Stitch, using a space dyed chenille for the lacing. Not an easy thread to manipulate, but I think it was worth the effort!

The snail is worked in stranded cotton, an overdyed thread for the shell and aolid brown for the body. When I’d done that, the body seemed too solidly coloured, too much of a contrast, so I put a few lighter stitches over it to bring body and shell together.

Have you got any new designs coming out soon?
I’m working on some designs for some kit manufacturers in the UK, but I’m not sure when they will be coming out. I’m still trying to work out what I can do, and how I can introduce it to the world. Watch this space, as they say.

Where can we find your designs?
At the moment, Classic Embroidery are issuing four of my counted cross stitch designs, inspired by Clarice Cliff’s Bizarreware. We are hoping to develop a range of surface embroidery designs as well, and at the moment I am trying to think of some ideas that could be developed into ranges of designs.

Other than that, I have been blogging about a large two-panel project I have started for my own enjoyment, and if there is any interest in any elements of that, I will try to design project sheets based on some of the elements.

You can visit Rachel’s blog VirtuoSew Adventures to see more of her gorgeous work, and follow the progress on her exciting new project.