Embroidery is Magic
Aug. 19th, 2011 04:04 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
treehatSomehow, I keep forgetting that LiveJournal exists. So I never posted my last embroidery project here:
Luna from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. (Why? Because I can. Also, I might as well subvert two gender stereotypes at once if I can.)
For reference, this is about three and a half inches high. Teensy! At least compared to everything else I've stitched.
I already had respect for people who did embroidery before, but attempting this piece increased that respect tenfold. Embroidery really is miles more involved than plain cross-stitch. The satin stitch (which is the stitch I used to fill in the solid color) is probably one of the simplest embroidery stitches, but I didn't even reach a basic understanding of it until I was nearly finished with this project. The section of hair on the left side is the only part I'm remotely happy with; in comparison, all the other stitches look too short and haphazard.
Other lessons learned: if I'm going to do anything like this again, I need to pick better-contrasting colors for the borders, instead of simply translating the color pallete to the direct floss equivalent. Even in person, it's hard to tell the border and the fill are separate colors in certain places. Also, maybe use thicker stitches - six strands instead the four strands used for the rest.
I'm still relatively pleased with it for a first embroidery project though. I wish I could take a better picture, but all I have is my phone's camera, and every shot I try to take flattens out the color and texture of the piece.
Luna from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. (Why? Because I can. Also, I might as well subvert two gender stereotypes at once if I can.)
For reference, this is about three and a half inches high. Teensy! At least compared to everything else I've stitched.
I already had respect for people who did embroidery before, but attempting this piece increased that respect tenfold. Embroidery really is miles more involved than plain cross-stitch. The satin stitch (which is the stitch I used to fill in the solid color) is probably one of the simplest embroidery stitches, but I didn't even reach a basic understanding of it until I was nearly finished with this project. The section of hair on the left side is the only part I'm remotely happy with; in comparison, all the other stitches look too short and haphazard.
Other lessons learned: if I'm going to do anything like this again, I need to pick better-contrasting colors for the borders, instead of simply translating the color pallete to the direct floss equivalent. Even in person, it's hard to tell the border and the fill are separate colors in certain places. Also, maybe use thicker stitches - six strands instead the four strands used for the rest.
I'm still relatively pleased with it for a first embroidery project though. I wish I could take a better picture, but all I have is my phone's camera, and every shot I try to take flattens out the color and texture of the piece.
