Hand Embroidery With Cheap Thread.

Some time ago on Ebay I bought a bumper amount of embroidery thread at a low price in various shades and colours and I was pretty chuffed with my purchase... until today! When I washed away the soluble paper after I had stitched the design ( I had spent many hours stitching whilst watching Olympics this week), the bright blue dye on one of the threads bled uncontrollably like a broken fountain pen. It has stained my material. Argh! Two technical blunders in as many projects. Perhaps fate is telling me to give up!

 It doesn't look too bad, I suppose, but it is annoying.

 I like Meagan Ileana's hand embroideries. She uses clean lines with painted watercolour to shade parts of the background. I'm not sure how she stops the paint from getting out of control and bleeding all over the cloth, maybe it's something to experiment with.

It's the last day of my exhibition with the Circus of Illustration at the Place theatre in Bedford. Here are some snaps of the work. I can't wait to exhibit some personal work again soon.

Embroidery Mistake

Usually when I do hand embroidery I draw my image onto soluble paper, which I baste onto my fabric. The paper dissolves straight away so I was really confused when this didn't happen to this piece. It turns out I have used fabric interfacing! What a dope! The plastic iron-on side was touching the fabric so I was able to fuse it, but I'm not happy with it...

 It's not perfect, you can see the texture of the interfacing as it is lighter in colour to the beige background and the creases in the face can't be ironed out or stretched. I felt so depressed about it last night, five hours of work thrown away! And it was going to be in an exhibition next month! I've learned a few lessons and everything in my craft box is going to get labeled from now on. Not sure what do with her. Have her in my house as a reminder to pay attention, perhaps.

100 followers: Thank you!

Today I have discovered that I have 100 fellow bloggers following this blog. Thank you so much for your support! It's great to know that there are people out there who are reading my rambles!
I've photographed some more embroidered illustrations. I'm still experimenting and not everything is a success, but I'm enjoying the process.