Bronze...

'Bronze' is a piece of fibre art I just finished. This time I was focussing more on trying out embroidery stitches for surface embellishment, as well as beading. I found some beautiful bronze-gold silk tops in my local embroidery shop, which inspired me to go for an Autumnal colour feel.

First I made the base layer with my embellisher. I used scrim, vintage Japanese fabric, cotton fabric, paper and silk in shades of yellow, orange and gold. On top of the base layer I added a sprinkling of chocolatey wool nepps, and some lovely wavy smoky brown cotswold fleece.

Next I added beads - some of my tiny glass seed beads, and a sprinkling of toho beads and a moukaite sphere.

Finally, I tried out some hand embroidery stitches of various sorts (I recently bought a book so that I could teach myself more than the basic ones I knew, so this was my opportunity to try them out!). Using hand-dyed thread and copper metallic thread, I tried out: satin, half-portuguese, fly, seed, running, wave, feather, and Cretan stitches, as well as French knots. In the picture to the left you can see the wave, seed and running stitches, as well as some French knots.

I hadn't thought much (again!) about how to frame/finish the piece... so there was very little unused border around the edges. This kind of limited me to hemming and framing like I did with 'Atlantis'.

I really liked the way the colours turned out, and I really enjoyed trying out the embroidery, using all the new stitches I learned. I think for my next project though, one goal will be to try something different from the hemmed, squarish-shaped idea of the finished piece. My Dad suggested trying for a more organic, circular shape (maybe using an embroidery hoop as a guide?) and using a bigger backing piece. Looking forward to giving it a go!