O western wind when wilt thou blow

Finally , the third leaf is finished...random colour ,freestyle stitches ,splits and texture changes -it's all there.One of my students showed me some lovely yarn from Habu ,which is made from bamboo and copper, so I used this to make the leaf skeleton tip.

Honi Soit Qui Mal Y Pense

I made this piece in 2008 but lost all the pictures in the great computer crash !!! As you can see it is a black satin late Victorian style corset , fully steel boned with silver 'beading'. Except it's not beading.......

  I spent a long time going to charity shops and bric-a-brac shops to find old tins of pins. They had to have a large head and it seems that only old pins have this.I lost count of how many I used and how long it took to insert them all. The pattern I made was of large peonies, leaves, snails and  Death's Head hawk moths.
  The base was made to hold the corset as if it were on a dress stand but so that you can see inside and view all the pin shafts. They form a wondrous fur-like texture in some areas.I wanted them to rust into position but they seem to be too good a quality for that !

O Rose Thou Art Sick

The second in my stumpwork dead leaves, a decaying rose leaf. This project is to test the possibilities of the technique and here it was random colour.
1 .To avoid a striped effect ( where you add a new colour at either side of the cordonnet and work from left to right) I added blocks of colour ( the brown and some grey brown thread) using the detached buttonhole technique but still attached to the cordonnet  (at random points around the cordonnet I just freestyled a bit!).
2. I also tried putting in a chain stitch in ochre thread ( the chain just lay where it wanted) which I then caught in as I went with the main green thread. This can be seen on the right hand side above.
3. All the random bits of colour where joined together by the single brussels stitch as I followed the rest of the leaf shape in the green thread.
This is all worked in cotton thread with a very fine brass wire cordonnet which was shaped afterwards.

 

West Dean

I have just come back from teaching raised embroidery at West Dean college which was an absolute joy. There is so much to inspire me there and I have come back with lots of interesting leaves for stumpwork projects and others !