I bought a very inspirational book last month and found a new way of making pictures from sketches. It's called 'Stitch Draw' by Rosie James and concentrates on images of people in different situations.
Kirsty has been posting pictures of herself on Facebook and they really caught my imagination with her curtain of beautiful red hair.
I printed off each picture, made a tracing and enlarged it to trace onto a piece of translucent polyester voile. Then I put the fabric in large embroidery hoop.
I had a lot of fun free machine embroidering the images in black and red thread.
The only problem I had was keeping the pole straight as the fabric got distorted when it was stretched in the hoop.
As each picture was completed I started to think how to finish and mount them so I had a rummage in my fabric box till I came across a length of stiffened gauze in a lovely turquoise colour.
I cut out pieces a bit larger than A4 so that I could fold the edges over the polyester to make a frame and then stitched the edges down with a zigzag stitch.
I stitched a length of blue cotton knitting yarn down the left hand side making 5 evenly spaced loops along the way so that I could put them all together in a cover. As I put the stack of pictures together I realised that I could see the next image through the top one which gives the book a lovely sense of movement as you turn the pages.
I found a lovely colour coordinated piece of batik in my stash and mounted it on a larger piece of gauze then stitched 5 buttonholes down the spine to pass the yarn loops through.
I joined all the loops together with some turquoise ribbon which was long enough to pass around the finished book and tie in a bow.
I'm really pleased with my first fabric book and I'm thinking it might be a good way to collect other embroidered pictures in the future.
