The next piece was to be a challenge for me simply because of its size!
My next assessment piece had to be a wallhanging at least 18 inches by 18 inches! This is much larger than I'm used to working, so I knew it would be a challenge. I spent time looking at different formats for wallhangings. I knew I wanted to do something a bit different and that I wanted to include some stumpwork flowers, so that was my starting point.
I eventually came up with this design for a stumpwork wallhanging, using a 14 inch embroidery hoop. Not the easiest size of hoop to come across, but not impossible.
Planning, Sampling and Preparation
A piece this size requires an awful amount of planning and preparation. The first stage was to make patterns of all the different elements of the design. Petals, leaves, butterfly wings and even the background all had their patterns.
I chose to dye all the fabric that I needed. I love the extra dimension that hand dyed fabrics and threads give to a piece of embroidery. The colour variation of hand dyed fabric just adds something extra. I also wanted to include some of my design work from earlier in the course, so I used my home printer to get a couple of those designs onto fabric too. These are used as some of the background fabrics. I had different bags of fabric and threads ready for each of the different elements of the design.
The Background
I cut rectangles of various green fabrics, then laid, pinned and basted them onto the a piece of muslin. Originally I had planned to do some machine stitching on the background, but changed my mind so that it was more of a Boro quilt style background. I love doing running stitch, it's a very underrated stitch in my opinion.
Once the background stitching was complete, I put it into the hoop. I also wrapped the outer ring of the embroidery hoop with matching fabrics, so that the hoop blended with the rest of the background.
Butterfly
I included a butterfly in my design, to add a bit of extra interest. So I decided that as I had so many flowers to stitch, I should stitch the butterfly first. I didn't want to run out of steam towards then end and either not stitch the butterfly very well or simply give up and leave it out! All the parts are wired and stitched on organza.
Flowers and Leaves
Because the stems and leaves of the design are overlapping, I'd had to plan which order to stitch everything in. Some of the leaves, like these ones were simply bonded and stitched to the background. However others that are further forward needed to be wired in order for them to overlap and stand out.
The flower centres are a ridiculous amount of French knots!
Each petal was individually wired. Very time consuming, for so many flowers.
Making-up
Each layer of flowers was stitched to the background, using the original pattern as a guide.
The Finished Piece
It took over 116 hours, but I finally finished! Doing so many of the same flowers was much harder than I thought. Just doing the same thing over and over was not really something that I had been used to with embroidery, as I'd always worked on smaller pieces before. But for me at least, it was worth it.
After this I just had one more assessment piece to do for my City and Guilds course, read about it here: Final Assessment Piece! (claireharveyembroidery.com)