embroidery

Posts tagged
with embroidery

Craft

Dried Floral Arrangements Sprout from Elaborate Tulle-Based Embroideries

Using simple white tulle as her base, Olga Prinku creates lush arrangements of flowers, seedpods, berries, and other organic materials teeming with color and texture. She fastens the preserved florals, which she often grows or forages and then dries herself, to the mesh webbing, encircling an embroidery hoop with elaborate patterns or depicting figurative renderings of birds and individual blooms. Many of the pieces replicate the motifs found in nature or those prevalent in eastern European folklore, which the North Yorkshire-based artist ties to her upbringing in the Republic of Moldova.

Formerly a graphic designer, Prinku says her creative process is similar in her now-tactile medium, relying on trial and error and an understanding of color, shape, and overall composition. “I learned in graphic design to be willing to experiment with different ideas that I wasn’t sure would work, and then to be willing to give up on the ones that aren’t working and refine the ones that seem promising,” she says, sharing that her typographic hoops directly connect both practices.

Prinku teaches workshops and offers tutorials for those interested in learning her botanical craft and is releasing a book titled Dried Flower Embroidery that will be published this October by Quadrille. Find more of her luxuriant embroideries on Instagram. (via Lustik)

 

Craft

Ducks, Otters, and Other Wildlife Plunge into Water in Intricate Split-View Embroideries

Fiber artist Megan Zaniewski sends delicate air bubbles rippling through her water-based embroideries that capture the momentum of ducks, turtles, and other wildlife as they dive into a pond or lake. Through a combination of knots and straight stitches, Zaniewski deftly renders the animals as they burst through the surface, using threadpainting techniques with staggered strands of cotton to depict layered feathers and fur. She’s embroidered more than 70 different species in the last two years, when she started working with the fiber-based medium:

My exposure to hand embroidery began early, thanks to my mom and grandmother, who were both skilled at needlework. A couple of years ago I rediscovered some embroidery supplies tucked away and decided to make a few small embroidered landscapes of places we had visited. It quickly became my preferred art form…I enjoy the challenge of creating animated and detailed animal portraits with just the simple tools of a needle and thread, bringing them to life stitch by stitch.

Follow Zaniewski on Instagram to keep up with her split-view pieces, including the two large embroideries and 3-dimensional stumpwork piece she’s working on now.

 

Craft

Anatomical Embroideries Use Precise Stitches and Beads to Portray Muscles, Organs, and Bodily Systems

A single skeletal muscle contains hundreds of thousands of individual fibers stretched in long rows, an anatomical fact that the textile artist behind Ambroidering recreates in an unusually fitting manner. Based in Shropshire, England, the artist stitches precise embroideries of the human body, defining circular systems with sinuous threads, conveying the distinct layers of skin with sparkling beads, and translating the brain’s spongy matter into thick, puffy pockets. You can find many of the biologically focused pieces shown here on Etsy, and for similarly scientific works, check out Amber Griffith’s punch-needle pieces and Emmi Khan’s bodily systems.

 

Craft

Embroidered Landscapes Capture the Stillness of Pastoral Life through Dense Knots and Stitches

French knots, chain stitches, and straight lines become peaceful countrysides and abandoned shacks overrun by moss and vines in Katrin Vates’s embroideries. Using bleached canvas as a base, Vates works with thread in natural color palettes of greens or autumnal hues that she lays in variable lengths and thicknesses: she conveys a glistening ocean through flat, even stitches in blues and white, while tufts of neutral tones become cropped fields and dried bushes. Vates rarely sketches a preliminary design and never attaches a hoop, which allows more freedom to adjust both the image and the ways weather and sunlight impact the scenes.

The Rockville, Maryland-based artist plans to release some of her pieces on Etsy in the coming months, and you can follow that launch, in addition to her forays into three-dimensional embroideries, on Instagram. (via Kottke)

 

Craft Design

Bright Tufts, Coils, and Lengthy Stitches Are Embroidered into a Textured Typographic Series

Graphic designer Panna Eszenyi shifts her practice to a more tactile medium in a series that deftly merges embroidery and typography. Created as part of the 36 Days of Type challenge, the thread-based alphabet is Eszenyi’s foray into the craft and an exercise in utilizing a wide variety of stitches. The resulting series fluctuates in font, color, and style with both ornate cross-hatched letters, tufted flourishes, and more minimal, geometric interpretations.

Eszenyi just finished her second year at Eszterházy Károly Egyetem in Eger, Hungary, and you can follow her projects on Behance and Instagram.

 

 

Art

Preserved Grasses and Twigs Radiate Outward in Delicately Embroidered Sculptures by Artist Kazuhito Takadoi

Artist Kazuhito Takadoi (previously) tames the unruly grasses, leaves, and twigs grown in his garden by weaving the individual strands into exquisite radial sculptures. Stitched into paper or bound to wooden discs made of cedar of Lebanon, oak, elm, or walnut, the abstract forms hover between two and three dimensions and utilize traditional Japanese bookbinding techniques to secure the threads. Each artwork, whether an intricately overlapping mass or pair of circular sculptures, is an act of preservation and a study of inevitable transformation: although the materials won’t decompose entirely, subtle shifts in color and texture occur as they age. “As the light changes or the point of view is moved, so the shadows will create a new perspective,” the artist says.

Born in Nagoya, Japan, Takadoi is currently based in the U.K. His meticulously woven works will be on view from June 22 to 29 at Artefact in Chelsea Harbor, and you can find a larger collection of his pieces on Artsy and jaggedart.