Love Buzzard's Crafts & Life

I have been doing regular embroidery for more years than I like to remember but have just started doing silk ribbon embroidery.  I have a feeling that all the other types of embroidery that I used to do just may fall by the wayside.  I absolutely LOVE the look of silk ribbon embroidery and it is really so easy to do.  And unlike other types of embroidery that use threads or yarns, ribbon is so forgiving and even a mistake can end up looking good.  Also with the ribbon one can cover a lot of area in a very short time as opposed to counted cross stitch or needlepoint where it seems to sometimes take forever to complete a piece.

One of my embroidery groups, Hand Embroidery, decided to have a heart swap and since I had never been involved in a swap I decided to take part.  I thought and thought about whether to make the heart a CQ one or just a plain one but I finally decided to go with a solid pink satin.  I would have used red but know there are lots of people who do not like red.  Don’t understand that since it is my favorite color.  :O) I had to search to find silk ribbon here in my neck of the woods in Louisiana but finally found some little packages at Hobby Lobby.  I can’t wait to have the money to buy ribbon on spools for pressing the ribbon is not a fun job.  I even melted a piece of one ribbon.  And then my son’s kitten ate a piece of another one.  For that she is banned from my studio.  :O)

Finally had all the ribbons pressed and ready to start my stitching.  I had decided to do a bouquet of flowers so my first step was to make a woven basket.  For that I did use red and made the basket of six strands of DMC.  I was so careful not to pull the warp thread too tight but then when I put in the weft threads the area was puckered.  I thought about taking it all out and then decided that I would not do that.  I am working hard to over come being a perfectionist.  Then like a dummy I started on the flowers on the left side forgetting that I should put stems first.  Needless to say I was unhappy with the look of the flowers.  I put in a few leaves and still was not happy.  About this time I was beginning to regret buying all those silk ribbon embroidery books from Amazon and thinking about returning them for I was sure that this type of embroidery was not for me.  Since I was feeling that way, I  took a break and had a snack.  In my opinion, food always helps a bad situation and helps clear the mind.  :O)

When I came back I started putting flowers in the middle and on the right side.  Things were looking up now and the flowers were looking better.  Like a dunce I still had not put in stems.  The first leaves I stitched I did not like so I put a flower over a group of them and that helped some.  Anyway I decided that it was time to put in the stems and more leaves.  It was the wee hours of the morning so instead of searching for a matching DMC green for the stems I just twisted the 4mm ribbon and made straight stitches for stems.  At that time I thought it looked fine but now after the heart is in Korea and I look at the picture the stems are really bad.  :O)  But I kept telling myself this was my first ever silk ribbon embroidery.  Added a few leaves and then added the last four flowers.

This heart was to be finished on the edges so I had done a very tight and narrow zigzag around the outside edge of the heart.  The original plan was to do the embroidery and then put a backing on and zigzag so that the backside of the stitches would be covered and the entire heart would look neater.  Well of course I forgot that and put the backing on first and did the stitching.  But when the heart is put on something the back will not show anyway.  Now that the embroidery was finished it was time to trim the heart very close to the zigzag stitches.  I actually did it without cutting the first stitch.

After the edge was trimmed, I needed to decide what lace or other edging I was going to use around the outside edge of the heart.   I probably tried six or seven different edgings before I finally found the one that I thought looked the best.  When I finally finished stitching the beaded lace around the edge it was about four in the morning and I was oh so tired.  But I had finished the heart and it would go in the mail later in the day. By the way I am the queen of leaving things until the very last minute. :O)  Had to set my alarm so that I would be up in time to get to the post office before three for at that time the clerk closes out for the day and then will only take cash.  Of course I had no cash but I make it on time and the heart was bound for Korea.

Now when I look at a picture of the heart I think that it looks pretty good but since I still have a tendency to be a perfectionist and also my own worst critic I can see every thing that is wrong with it.  Then I tell myself that after all it was my first attempt at silk ribbon embroidery.  It seemed that on every flower there would be one petal that would not cooperate and would end up more narrow that the other petals.  Two or three days after I had mailed the heart I was looking at two silk ribbon embroidery books written by two of the leading ladies in the field of crazy quilting and silk ribbon embroidery.  Guess what I saw?  You guessed it, there were flowers shown that also had a narrow petal when all the rest of the petals were perfectly shaped.  :O)  That made me feel a lot better about my little pink heart with silk ribbon embroidery flowers and their skinny petals.

One thing that that became very evident as I was working on the ribbon embroidery on the heart is that from now on when I do silk ribbon embroidery I will use an embroidery hoop.  In fact the next day I went to Hobby Lobby and bought a frame that one sits on thus leaving both hand free and with ribbon one does need both hands free.  :O)

And here is my little pink heart with crazy shaped flowers I did for my first swap.  All the hearts that have been done for this swap are beautiful and I can hardly wait to see which one I get back.  Forgot to mention that my little signature heart became a flower in the bottom left near the basket.  :O)

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 16th, 2006 @ 6:47 PM on the category CQ & Embellishments. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.