Angst free stumpwork

Stumpwork is an embroidery technique I admire immensely. I am drawn two directions with embroidery – towards contemporary free style embroidery (both machine and hand) and historical and traditional embroidery – crewel work, stumpwork, black work, white work……

Stumpwork always fills me with angst. It is fiddly, time consuming, detailed and structured. And I enjoy it – I love working with fiddly small details. But, sometimes I read the instructions and the lists of supplies and I quake. I never have the right stuff, I never follow directions properly, and sometimes the thought of starting something doomed to failure is just too much to contemplate …so I put the books back on the shelf and do something else.

And then a week ago I thought: What if I take the angst out of the stump work? What if I ignore the instructions and just do what I want? So I did. And I made this pear tree for the pear page. And I am happy with it. (And I know you shouldn’t start a sentence with ‘and’ and guess what – I don’t care! See how reckless I’ve become). This is the final* image for the apple and pear page – Moo wanted to know why I had a Christmas tree with golden bells in my fruit book.

Materials: stranded cotton, coffee dyed calico, felt padding. Stitches: padded satin stitch, chain stitch, fishbone stitch. I didn’t worry about drum tight fabric in the hoop; I sketched the tree on the calico with a 2b pencil and went from there. I used my needle (I don’t know what size, probably wrong according to the ‘books’) as a ‘laying tool’ to ensure the stitches lay flat and aligned with each other.

Stitching magic

By the way – if you think that the satin stitch looks good – it’s because it is padded. The first layer of satin stitch (over a stab stitched felt shape)was gappy and messy, the second layer (worked in the opposite direction to the first) was much smoother, and the third layer (worked in the opposite direction to the second) was almost perfect – even though I took the same amount of care with each layer. ‘Tis a little bit of stitching magic. Of course three layers of satin stitch take a ridiculous amount of time. Each pear is about the size of one of my (short) fingernails.

Front cover: the mysterious unknown stump work fruit

 

This is the picture for the front cover of the book (approx 2 inches by 1 ¾ inches). A mysterious unknown fruit – is it a peach, an orange, an apple, a persimmon? I like the idea that even I don’t know.

Stranded cotton on silk. The fruit is stitched using the same technique as the pears.

 

Title of the book.

I put a lot of thought into this and I came up with:

Stemstitch in 3 strands of cotton. It’s the same colour as the fruit in the above picture. The cloth is a green similar in colour to the stitched leaves.

Now I might actually go and finish it.

* I have made 6 pages (3 back to back) for the book, plus a front and back cover (in progress). I am constructing the book in such a way I can add more pages at a later stage for all the fruit that missed out: grapes (I never did get them done), pineapple, kiwifruit among them.