Sunday 25 October 2009

The Wedding Present Embroidery is all finished!

I'm sorry I didn't post progress pics, I took them but I was kind of up against it to get it done in time for my brother's wedding.

Probably didn't arrive in time anyway thanks to Royal Fail.

But here it is, the secret obsession that has taken up much of my spare time for the past four months!

Apologies for the wierd colour of the pics, I photographed it in various different lights, and it still doesn't look as pretty as it does in real life.

The real thing is almost A4.

The thing itself


Top detail

bottom detail


The forget-me-nots. They are four differnt colours ranging from cornflower blue to a pale blueish mauve. If you ever look at a spray of forget-me-nots the very top ones are mauve or pink!


The top flower. It's abrighter pink that the bottom flower.


The bottom flower.

The bottom forget me nots


Detail of the leaves. I'm not massively impressed with the way the stems join on to the leave, the satin stitch and the long and short stitch don't seem to meld very well.

Ok, so here is how I mounted it ready for framing.

When I took it off the slate frame it was kind of puckered! So I found some instructions for mounting embroidery. You take acid free foam board and pad it with polyester batting, to give a nice smooth surface and pad out any lumps and bumps. OOOPs, no polyester batting. So I figured that they must have used this method prior to the invention of polyester batting so what would they have used. Fabric? Several layers of? So I chose cotton muslin as the loosest weave fabric I could find, and used about eight layers. I think it worked fine, and I prefer it to polyester batting on general principals.



Then I stretched the embroidery over the padded board using pins.


I kept stretching each side repeatedly until all the puckers were smooth.

Then it was time to lace the emboidery over the frame so the pins could be removed afterwards.



Now I'm wondering what to do next! But I have a frock to finish for consequences and a couple of half finished smaller projects so I sould keep busy.