Sharon Boggon - Creative Stitches for Contemporary Embroidery: Visual Guide to 120 Essential Stitches for Stunning Designs

Publisher: Amy Barrett-Daffin Creative Director: Gailen Runge Acquisitions Editor: Roxane Cerda Managing Editor: Liz Aneloski Editor: Karla Menaugh Technical Editor: Debbie Rodgers Cover/Book Designer: April Mostek Production Coordinator: Zinnia Heinzmann Production Editor: Alice Mace Nakanishi Photography by Sharon Boggon and Jerry Everard Published by C&T Publishing, Inc., P.O. Box 1456, Lafayette, CA 94549 Summer Beach Days contemporary embroidery panel Dedication For my husband, Jerry, and my daughter, Eve Acknowledgments I would like to thank my ever-patient husband, Jerry Everard, for his work producing the photography in this book and his unfailing belief in what I do. Also, thanks go to my daughter, Eve Everard, for putting up with my creative passion for all things fabric and stitch. In my stitching life, I have been influenced by numerous people. I have been fortunate to have stitching friends both online and offline who have supported me and taught me much. Fabric postcard using French knots, bullion knots, and cast-on stitch worked on linen, perle cotton, wool, embroidery floss, and linen thread Introduction With this book, I invite you to join me on a creative path via creative embroidery. Fabric postcard using French knots, bullion knots, and cast-on stitch worked on linen, perle cotton, wool, embroidery floss, and linen thread Introduction With this book, I invite you to join me on a creative path via creative embroidery.

I aim to introduce you to a way of thinking about hand stitching that not only teaches you to embroider, but also gives you the tools to improvise and adapt stitches to your needs. Contemporary hand embroidery is a form of self-expression. As you stitch, you will make dozens of small choices, such as choosing a fabric, a stitch, a thread, a color, the thickness of thread, size and spacing of stitches, and so on. Through these small, personal decisions, you express yourself. As you stitch, resist comparing your creative work with others, and dont worry about being perfect. Exploring your creative self is not a competition.

How can you compete with something that cant be measured? Competition undermines creativity. Perfectionism freezes all creativity. As humans we are not perfect. Of course, we strive to improve and be better at what we do, but there is a great difference between aiming to improve, and perfection. Handmade items are a little bit wobbly, a little uneven, and you relate to them because they leave a trace of the hand that made them. They are human rather than perfect.

There is very little right or wrong in contemporary textile practice, just methods of working that are suitable for what you are making, and other methods that are unsuitable. What do I mean by methods that are suitable and unsuitable? To give you an example, if you make a garment, obviously it has to be stitched so that it will hold together. This will influence the process. If the garment is to be embellished with embroidery, this will also influence your choice of stitches. The stitching will need to be washable and reasonably hard-wearing. That constraint will influence your creative choices.

On the other hand, if you are making something for purely decorative purposes, the item may need to hang on a wall, or it may be smallsuch as a fabric postcard. Because these items are to be used in different ways, their use will influence the type of embellishment you might choose. Remember these few ideas as you stitch, because these ideas can be liberating, particularly if you have ever had a needlework teacher negatively criticize your efforts. Enjoy your journey and sit and relax with your stitching, as the embroidery police have long gone. Its time to banish them from your head too! Detail from a fabric book page Tools and Supplies Supplies Fabrics You can use just about any fabric for contemporary creative embroidery. Of course, some fabrics are better than others.

For instance, a stretchy fabric is not ideal fabric for hand embroidery. It can be done, by interfacing the back of the fabric, but it is not ideal. Some of the fabrics you can use easily are linen, cotton (including quilting cotton), silk, rayon, wool, linen/cotton blends, or wool/silk blends. Even-weave specialty embroidery fabrics Also, look for the many specialty fabrics that are even-weave. An even-weave fabric is a cloth woven with the same number of threads per inch in both directions, so the weave creates a regular, square grid. Selection of hand embroidery threads Threads Using a variety of threads can lift your stitching from the mundane to an interesting textural feast. Selection of hand embroidery threads Threads Using a variety of threads can lift your stitching from the mundane to an interesting textural feast.

The trick is to use a range of threads to experiment and see what is possible. Try to develop a thread stash that includes different fibers of varying thickness and textures. Exploring creative embroidery is your excuse to experiment with the huge variety of threads available! Cotton, perle cotton, silk, rayon, metallic, chenille, silk ribbon, and ribbon floss are just a few threads that you can use with creative surface stitchery. Most people start by using stranded cotton or embroidery floss, as that is what they have to hand and it comes in many colors. Embroidery floss has six strands that you can divide. The thread has a good drape, so you can easily twist it around your needle.

For very fine-detailed stitching, you can use one or two strands. For embroidery that is more dramatic, you need to use the full six strands of your stranded cotton. Perle cotton is a nondivisible thread used for many styles of surface embroidery. I suggest you experiment with #5, #8, and #12, as perle cotton has a tight twist which means it stitches up with a firmer texture compared to stranded cotton floss. This means your stitches will sit slightly higher when worked in perle cotton.