Learning Something New Is Messy - Embroidery

Moving away from full sized quilts into textile art made me realize I have a big gap in my skills: embroidery. I did some when I was in high school. That’s been over 40 years ago! I began poking around YouTube and ran across the Featherstitch House channel. A lovely English lady teaches embroidery stitches (among other textile art related things). One of the ideas she’s shared is creating a textile, embroidery stitch, reference book A to Z. Her A page looks like this:

She uses a bit fabric to set the colors she’ll use on the page, then adds bits of lace, buttons, beads, felt, and most importantly a bunch of embroidery stitches beginning with the letter A. I took one look at her process, and decided that maybe I needed to do something similar until I am more sure with my stitches. I don’t want to “practice” on my actual textile art piece. And it will give me an idea of which stitches I enjoy. To that end, here is the beginning of my A page:

I used a piece of apple print - after all A is for Apple, right? (Strangely enough, I remember exactly where this apple fabric came from. It was a gift from a quilter I knew through the internet back in the 90’s. We emailed several times per week. I think we’d still be in touch, but she died. I remember her with great fondness.)

The zig zag stitch is called the Arrowhead stitch. I may be removing this attempt. Granted this is for practice, but it’s really pretty bad.

And here is the embroidery floss and embellishments I plan to add to the page. (I purchased some bits and bobs on Etsy from estate sales.) I haven’t brought out the buttons or beads yet.

Embroidery is so far outside my comfort zone that I’m slow and awkward. I don’t know how long it will be before I get back to the project that started this. But I have finished laying down the fabric strips and added some batting to the back of it. The little piece of selvage in the bottom right corner was added because one of my strips did not make it all the way to the bottom. I don’t even know if it will show when it’s all said and done, but I kind of like it.