An unusual commission

First, a message for Jacki Tyndall. All your messages have ended up in my spam folder (I've no idea why!) and don't have your e-mail address on them.   Can you just log directly into the blog (theaccidentalembroiderer.typepad.com) and try again?

OK, on to this week's project. Some time ago, a visitor to one of our exhibitions asked me if I would be able to do a special commission for her. Intrigued, I said yes, but maybe I should have had a look at what she wanted me to do before I agreed. She produced an illustration by a well-known Art Deco artist, and said that she wanted me to reproduce it in embroidery.

The original image

That was fine, and the design would have been easy enough to do, if she had wanted it at a small size. The problem was that she wanted it done at a really large size – something like a yard/metre tall. It goes without saying that I didn’t have a hoop anywhere near large enough to do that, so to embroider it would mean splitting the design and “piecing” it on the fabric. And the various parts of the design were all at different angles, so the placing of the hoop would also have to be at different angles

 I won’t bore you with all the problems that cropped up during the weeks that I was working on this. It took 12 different files and 12 different hoopings, each at a different angle, but more by luck than judgement the result wasn’t too bad. There were a few problems with it – for example, there are a few inaccuracies in the placing of some of the elements, and the green felt that I used to embroider on rather “sucked” the light out of the gold thread, so the gold isn’t as bright as in the original. But the client wanted that shade of green, and I had to use felt, because if I’d used woven fabric the danger of rucking and buckling in such a large piece would have been too great. I also decided that embroidery couldn’t reproduce the little bright “stars” scattered around, so I used different kinds of gold beads glued in place

  The result

It’s not a totally accurate copy of the original, and the photograph doesn’t do it any favours (it’s washed out the colour a lot) but if you think of it as an “interpretation” rather than a copy, it does well enough