Vines and Butterflies!

Had a busy few weeks and kept forgetting to update!

First of all, Happy Mother's Day! I can finally post the picture of a little something I made for my mother...

Since last time I've been very busy with leaves. I did some more sewing and beading before cutting them all out (regretted sewing so many at this point) and sewing them onto my vines

(I quite liked them at this stage, they were like a little pile of autumnal leaves)

I also had a play with butterflies. I managed to get all 95 sewn so I could play around with some wire and beads

Not too sure about the beads, I think they look a little bulky and I wanted the butterflies to look very light and airy.
What do you think?
 
We also had a talk from the amazing embroiderer Karen Nicol (http://www.karennicol.com/) about her work. She even came to talk to a few of us about our work and I was lucky enough to be given some amazing advice from her.

 

 #KarenNicol #leaves #vines #butterflies #embroidery #Mother'sDay

Leaves, Beads and Butterflies

Had a busy couple of weeks. It started off with leaves for my vines and embroidering vast amounts of them before some were beaded. Had a bit of a nightmare when some of the tiny purple beads wouldn't fit over my needle but I got a real beading needle which has been a great help.

I then spent a few days in the print room hand painting a few butterflies (so I didn't get too bored of leaves) before they were embroidered and shaped for my back-lace...

I've been using some gorgeous silk organza, silk chiffon and crepe de chine for the butterflies, just need to find something that will shape them nicely.

 

#butterflies #leaves #beads #embroidery #print

Back to Vines!

This week has been so exciting! And hectic and so busy but it's been great. I've finally started on my vine piece! I dyed so many pieces of fabric that I did some maths and figured out it added up to 300+ bits of dyeing which I was quite impressed with. They were then cut down, sewn together and turned the right way around so the seams were beautiful and neat and that's the main stems finished!

When I was dyeing all the strips of fabric I did sort of take over the dye lab for a change.

The finished stems! To give some perspective on size some are about 2 meters long and all are this thickness

All that's left to do now is make millions of leaves to cover them. This is something leafy I was working on the other week but I might use some beads for these leaves...

#vines #leaves #dipdye #beads #sewing #silk