lazy or smart?

When was the last time I posted something unrelated to tatting? Hmmm, probably a year back for the Pinterest Challenge in December – that cute little bird. It still sits on my bedside cabinet with pins stuck in it!

This time I'm sharing a very quick mixed media project involving painting and embroidery, done sometime around mid-2000.

These pics were taken quite a while back, hence not as sharp, bright, rich and clear as I’d like them to be. Apologies for the poor quality.

The background is a light yellow but not as washed out as it looks here.

I’d wanted to embroider a bedsheet for ages, but was fearful of it becoming an UFO. Once during our summer vacation we forced our Mom to give us separate bedsheets to embroider and she succumbed despite her valid fears of us not completing them. The sheets did get finished but only after she sat alongside and embroidered the remaining motifs over the months following the vacation ;-P

Going by that experience, I decided to do something quick but covering a large area. After scouring through my pattern collection, I zeroed in on my favorite book – Creative Stitchcraft. It has a beautiful Bouquet of Roses Quilt – red stem-stitch embroidery on white background.

I went for colours, but a mere stem-stitch outline would look too barren. So after I had enlarged the template – drawing manually, since I was excited to start immediately – and transferred it to the cloth I looked in my fabric paints box – I use Fevicryl acrylics.

I had a few left over from painting a free-hand saree border for my MIL earlier.

Diluted them and did a quick wash. A thicker coat of paint could've caused some stiffening of the fabric making it difficult to embroider, and taken longer to dry obviously.

There’s a bit of yellow paint in the rose petals, too.

I deliberately didn’t ‘stay within the lines’, keeping it a bit random with some unwashed areas or some overlapping of colours, to give it a natural shading.

Then simple stem-stitch along all the outlines.

I kept the stitches very short, using 2 strands of Anchor embroidery threads throughout.

Manoeuvering becomes easier when stitches are short. Abrupt curves, sharp ends, pointed ends, etc. can b e neatly managed. 

Mary Corbet has some excellent tips & tutorials which I had already figured out on my own. 

There is also a lovely Morning Glory border in the original pattern which I did not use here. This seemed fine on its own. 

Yay, it was all over within a week – from enlarging to the very last knot! 

Is this multimedia project smart or sheer lazy? You decide :-D

Bouquet of Roses pattern from the book "Creative Stitchcraft". (Better Homes and Gardens) Murdoch Books. 1991.