Substituting Other Embroidery Threads & Stitches Tomorrow, when we look at adding leaves, I’ll show you some pictures that will give you the scale of the tree, and talk about thread choices and scale. The tree is 2.5″ tall, from the base of the trunk to the highest tip on the tree, so it is not large at all. From this point I added a few more twiggy things on the right, and I filled out the trunk a little bit as well. Just “eye-ball” it as you go, to make sure it looks passable as the body of a tree!Īnd, of course, the leaves will hide a multitude of errors, so if you find yourself thinking that a branch looks All Wrong, don’t sweat it! Chances are, you can cover it up with leaves. Symmetry is out the window here – very rarely do you see symmetrical trees in nature – so don’t bother trying to make one side perfectly even with the other.
Gimp weaving free#
The upshot is this: you can be pretty free and random in your stitching!įor the top of the tree where the branches fill out, I just filled away, adding a twig here, a branch there, and allowing some of the branches to bump into others and occasionally to cross over them. In the center of the tree, where you see the darkish blob, I took the path of the gimp around and over itself to make that center “knot” in the bark.
Once I had the primary “paths” of the tree on the fabric, I went in and filled in between them, alternating the colors of the gimp here and there. There was no set rule I followed on filling the tree trunk and branches, but to keep a continuous flow from trunk to branch at least in some areas of the tree, I started in various places at the base and worked up the trunk and up the branches in one piece of thread. After all, couching is a very simple technique! I’m using Strathaven linen here, in a natural color.įilling the tree’s body in with couched silk gimp was easy. After doodling trees on paper for a bit, I just drew a basic shape straight onto the fabric. I didn’t bother transferring from any pre-drawn design. Your body of your tree doesn’t need to be perfect, symmetrical (anything but that!) or absolutely exact. They aren’t the most attractive things in the world – but they don’t have to be. I just used some nearby graph paper and sketched up some tree-ish shapes. Let’s get on with making the tree!įirst, decide what your tree is going to look like. I just selected a brown that looked close enough, because, after all, there all kinds of shades of color in the trunk of a tree, and I didn’t feel the need to be too precise. To couch the silk gimp, I used Soie de Paris in different colors of brown, light, medium, and dark. The resulting tree will look different, but it will still be a tree! You don’t need silk gimp to embroider a tree. Wait and hope! The only reason I have this little bit is because I was given some “seconds” to try out.īut even if you don’t have silk gimp, you can use other threads to achieve tree-like results. But hopefully, in the near-ish future, we’ll see it trickle out to the general market and become available for the rest of us. The lucky ducks participating in the Cabinet class have first dibs on it (you’re in for a treat!). The thread is made in small batches, and because it came about specifically for that class, it’s not available right now for purchase. This silk gimp was re-created for the Cabinet of Curiosities class that Tricia Nguyen is running at Thistle Threads. After a flurry of e-mail and commentary about where to find the thread, I thought I should clarify that point, briefly. This is the silk gimp I wrote about the other day. These are the threads I used for the body of the tree. Today, I’ll show you how I worked the trunk and branches, and while meandering through the topic, I’ll talk a bit about the silk gimp used for the tree (making some clarifications about the thread, what it is, and its pending availability), and a bit about how you can adapt the process covered here to other materials. Therefore, I didn’t feel too odd about branching out with the silk gimp the other day and embroidering a tree. Trees show up in hand embroidery in practically every era and every culture, in some respect or another.
Now, trees may seem like fairly mundane, unimportant things, but can you imagine life on this earth without trees? Trees may be common, but they are, at the same time, essential, and in art, throughout history, the tree has enjoyed an important representative role, symbolizing many different things across cultures.
While playing around with silk gimp the other day, I was struck with the inspiration to embroider this tree.
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