Labels

Lunch-Related Blasphemy

So I have a problem, and so does one of my oldest friends. We tend to kind of...forget about lunch. It's even worse when one or both of us is so invested in whatever we're working on that we can't find the time to text the other and ask if she's eaten yet, and we've gotten pretty creative about how we phrase the reminder.

One day, I asked, around 2:30 p.m., if she had considered her lord and savior, lunch? She cracked up, and the phrase stuck with me until a few weeks later, when I had the idea for her Christmas present this year. I messaged her again to ask how she felt about blasphemy on her wall, she said it wasn't really a big deal, and off I went.

A photo of a plain wooden embroidery hoop with a dull silver screw, sitting on a white shelf against a white wall. The hoop holds turquoise fabric embroidered with "Have you considered your lord and savior" in small yellow backstitch around the edges of the circle, and "lunch" in large satin-stitch capital letters of lavender, two shades of green, garnet, and navy. "Lunch" ends in a bright-yellow question mark, and five scattered sunflowers with outlined leaves fill the space below.
This may be the most attractive finished-product photo I've ever taken.
I have been charmed by the idea of the little embroidered artworks meant to be finished and hung in their hoops for a few years, but until the green and peach bliaut, I hadn't really done any embroidery, and I knew I wouldn't be satisfied with clumsy stitches. I think the practice helped, despite the wildly differing styles.

A plain wooden embroidery hoop with a dull silver screw, holding a rough-cut square of turquoise fabric. A needle threaded with bright-yellow thread is stabbed through the upper right corner of the cloth.
Awww yeah, selvedges. I fricking love selvedges.
I gave myself absolutely huge borders on this piece, not remembering how much the fabric tended to fray and not having decided how I planned to finish the back of the piece when I was done embroidering. The needle was the smallest I could squash six strands of embroidery floss through.

A plain wooden embroidery hoop with a dull silver screw, holding turquoise fabric embroidered with "Have you considered" in small yellow backstitch around the upper edge of the circle.
Freehand...because I like to live on the edge.
I'd fiddled with a few potential layouts on paper, and found that most of them didn't play well with the set-up/punchline rhythm of the statement. I knew I wanted LUNCH in large capitals, and I was planning to use satin stitch blocks of color defining the letters as negative space, so I needed a large area for that portion of the design. When I found the annular layout that felt right, I just started stitching—I wasn't going to wash the piece, so even chalk wasn't a satisfying option for laying out the finer stitching, as it's hard to rub out with stitches to catch the dust again.

A plain wooden embroidery hoop with a dull silver screw, holding turquoise fabric embroidered with "Have you considered your lord and savior" in small yellow backstitch around the edges of the circle.
This is the part where showing the nascent project became a bit of a litmus test of the viewer.
The ampersand is for space reasons. Also I wanted to see if I could do it.

A plain wooden embroidery hoop with a dull silver screw, holding turquoise fabric embroidered with "Have you considered your lord and savior" in small yellow backstitch around the edges of the circle, and "lunch" in large satin-stitch capital letters of lavender, two shades of green, garnet, and navy. "Lunch" ends in a bright-yellow question mark. Two rows of bright yellow petals for a small sunflower are just off-center below "lunch," with a threaded needle set on top of the work.
Itty-bitty teeny-weeny sunflower starting to bloom.
There is no record of the original color-blocking idea. It was mostly an exercise in remembering that the simpler an effect appears, the more likely it becomes that the creator has years of experience doing it. The satin-stitch letters also put the emphasis back where I wanted it, on LUNCH.

And then there was a bit more negative space than I liked beneath the word, so I started adding sunflowers, which Bananabella loves.

A plain wooden embroidery hoop with a dull silver screw, holding a orugh square of turquoise fabric embroidered with "Have you considered your lord and savior" in small yellow backstitch around the edges of the circle, and "lunch" in large satin-stitch capital letters of lavender, two shades of green, garnet, and navy. "Lunch" ends in a bright-yellow question mark, and five scattered sunflowers with outlined leaves fill the space below.
The sunflower centers are dozens of French knots.
On another friend's advice, I added a fine gold backstitch to highlight the letters of LUNCH, and then the piece sat quietly in the Bag Of (Future) Christmas Joy for a bit, while I worked on other projects.

The back of a plain wooden embroidery hoop with a rough square of turquoise fabric and messy gold, lavender, and garnet threads showing. The fabric is partially folded back to fill the space inside the hoop, and stitched with blue thread, which drapes over the green formica countertop until it reaches the silver needle.
That back was a thread snag waiting to happen.
Suddenly it was the day after Christmas, and I needed to have this finished and wrapped to deliver to Bananabella about an hour after I woke up. Good thing I almost always have sewing with me now—I used doubled thread to stitch a rough amoeboid shape, folding and stitching sections of the border fabric as I went to hold the front taut and conceal the back of the embroidery, and my generous cutting came in handy. There was enough fabric to reach at least halfway across the hoop in enough places to completely cover the back.

The back of a plain wooden embroidery hoop with a dull silver screw, holding turquoise fabric folded back to fill the space inside the hoop, and stitched with blue thread to completely enclose the back of the embroidery.
Told you it was amoeboid.
I ran a few quick rows of ladder stitching up and down the center 'seam' of the backing, to further reinforce the drawstring stitches and help pin down the edges and corners still hanging loosely (though now at the center back of the piece). The slight corners still showing at the hoop edges of each pleat are small enough to be hidden when the hoop is hung up, so I didn't fuss about them.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment