New Hoop!

When I started thinking of an image to use for my first self designed hoop embroidery piece, I thought of tattoos and then, of course, of my older daughter’s tattoos. This picture (which hangs on our family picture wall) of her holding her niece (my youngest granddaughter) was taken 4 years ago at my Chicago niece’s wedding only a few months before we found out my daughter had Stage 4 colon cancer.

Luckily my younger daughter found a picture of them in color at her wedding a few years earlier. I must admit I don’t think this picture does justice to either of them. But it is a good shot of the tattoo.

I cropped and enlarged the picture and it was quite a challenge to trace and transfer it to the white duck fabric I had leftover from the Sashiko pillow. I bought some Aunt Martha’s Tracing Paper and an Aunt Martha’s Transfer Pencil at Jo-Ann Fabrics and eventually made a tracing that I was happy enough with to iron on the fabric. It worked but the lines were not as crisp as I would have hoped. I had to do quite a bit of adjusting as I stitched and there are still a few pinkish lines but I decided that I would embrace those as part of the tattoo.

I had written in my last post about hoop embroidery that I still found satin stitch difficult and was excited to learn thread painting. It turns out thread painting is not actually the name of a stitch but of the technique of using long and short stitches to look like brush strokes. So that is what I attempted. I did the outline in stem stitch using two strands of black and then I filled in with three strands using satin or long and short stitches. I used two strands to make tiny back stitches for the bird’s throat and three strands of chain stitch for the little black swooshes on the side.

I painted a 4 inch embroidery hoop black to frame it and hung it next to my dresser. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out both as an embroidery piece and as a tribute to my daughter. I’m not sure what she would think of it but I hope she would appreciate it.