Saturday, May 21, 2011

Kelee: Embroidering Dreams

It's not that I am not crafting, it's just that I'm sort of in between crafts. I have a couple of big deals in the works, though. In this time of transition between the two clays and the yarns, I have been doing a lot of soul searching, And nose blowing because I've also had a cold.
Back in October, I decided to try to embroider. The Girlchild drew a very lovely picture of our dog Stella, and then picked out some thread. I traced the picture on the shirt with a washable marker and followed one of 400+ tutorials that I read and used the back stitch.
Miraculously, she's been wearing it ever since, and it didn't fall apart in the washer.


I really enjoyed the whole event and decided to relive the wild ride this week. I started with another drawing by the Shegirl on my pillowcase. A very lovely pink and purple horse.


Then I moved on to the HusbandBen's pillowcase. He relented to let me embroider it on the condition that I would embroider his Stratocaster. He found a copy of it in the Musician's Friend catalog of embroider patterns.
I traced it with a Sharpie so I could sort of see it through the fabric, and then I traced it on with a pen. If Ben's version of this guitar was the nearly $4000 version, by the way, it'd have been long since pawned.
I used the split stitch for this one, French knots for the tuning knobby things and for the volume knobby things, and can you see that I even put on those little black dots on the fretboard. By the way, those spots that look like dirt on the pillow case are, in fact, dirt. I had the pillow case delicately strewn across my couch as I was admiring my own handiwork when the very same dee-oh-gee (from the original t-shirt embroidery fame) came in from the outdoors and immediately wiped her muddy little paws on the pillowcase with total disregard for my handiwork.
So while I'll be dreaming of horse riding through the fluffy pink clouds while eating cotton candy, Ben will dream of rocking out in front of millions of admiring fans, becoming addicted to the dope, std-infested groupies, bankruptness, and a slow descent into obscurity. Cool.

1 comment:

  1. Warning, Kelee: embroidery can be addictive! I have long loved both cross-stitch and traditional embroidery. All our Christmas stockings were painstakingly done by own OCD hands--two of which I also designed (the stockings, not the hands.) Keep up the good work....I especially love Apple's shirt. What a wonderful way to preserve her drawings!

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