I've admired the aerial view embroidery of Victoria Rose ever since her work first crossed my feed on social media. Along with the beautifully realistic faux pinned insects created in stumpwork embroidery by Megan Zaniewski, it made me want to have another go at embroidery. A surprise find of The Hand-Stitched Flower Garden by Yuki Sugashima at the charity shop made me even more determined to give it a go, once I found the right project.
Once again, the local charity shop delivered in the form of an unusual banana hook. This beauty is all wooden, with a bowl underneath that's perfect for holding a project. I knew right away that I wanted to do some kind of flying sculpture, with an element suspended from the hook over a landscape in the bowl.
My initial idea was to do the project in needle felting, but I wasn't sure I'd be able to get enough detail at that scale, so I opted for embroidery instead. Luckily, I already had an embroidery hoop that was just a little bigger than the bowl, so I had a quick practice of some stitches from The Hand-Stitched Flower Garden, and then started looking for a suitable aerial view to replicate for my landscape.
For this, I was inspired to pick a local green space by The Common Lot - a theatre company who put on productions about local issues. They'd just finished performing Mousehold to the Marsh; their production about local green spaces and their hope to collaborate with conservation efforts to create a green corridor from Mousehold Heath to Sweetbriar Marshes. Sweetbriar, by satellite view, didn't have enough space devoid of manmade structures for my taste, though I would have liked to have got a bit of the river Wensum into my work. I didn't fancy trying to embroider the rooftops of little buildings in stumpwork, so I chose Mousehold Heath instead. It took a bit of careful zooming and cropping to get a bit of the map with no buildings but enough variety to make it interesting, and I ended up with a pleasant variety of natural trails, heather, trees, and a small amount of a grassy sports area.
Getting the image onto the double layer of fabric (recycled from a cotton bedsheet) was a bit tricky. It was too thick to do with a lightbox and heat erase pens, and I didn't want to use tailor's transfer paper as it's prone to rubbing off before I finish my work, so I found some organza in my stash and pinned that over the top of a printed map while I sketched out the rough shapes in thread.
I chose split stitch for the sports ground, to give the impression of directionally mown grass, or perhaps longer grass blowing in the wind. The paths are worked in a long and short stitch to build up different thicknesses as the wander lines converge and part. The heath is my favourite so far, made up of French knots in heather pinks and various greens. I plan to use layers of different coloured seed stitches for the wild grassy areas. The trees will be made from embroidered Suffolk puffs, using circles covered in French knots to give them texture. You can see where I've started making them on the smaller hoop.
The trickiest part will be the bird, which will be made of multiple "slips" (embroidered shapes stiffened with wire) to give a fully 3D shape. This is really going to challenge my embroidery precision, and also my thread painting skills as I try to represent a recognisable plumage pattern in thread.
Wish me luck, I guess, and stay tuned for updates!
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