Ridiculously Tiny Goldwork Couching

Well, as the days start getting shorter, it's the time to make the most of all that natural daylight we've got left. Especially when I'm taking my goldwork or nue to new and somewhat ridiculous levels. As I blogged previously, I drew out the Budweiser beer label to start couching, only to find that two strands held together proved too thick. To get the detail I wanted, the only way was to re-commence the embroidery using ONE starnd of the red metallic thread to couch over at a time.

Considering that the red metallic thread is less than a mm wide, this took a LOT of patience. One inch high has 29 parallell rows. Yes, 29 rows covered vastly by tiny white couching stitches. Keep your hands clean (white's a pain to work with on such a scale as this) and stop every so often to put your eyes back in their sockets.

Don't play with your food

Alphabetti spaghetti. Mindless procrastination? Or subtle integration of new lettering into my illustration? I don't know. Either way, 'edible art' is definitely a new one for me.

Goldork Or Nue Cider label WIP

More new or nue.... I haven't been doing any of this for quite a while. But 3 months of hell are coming to an end and I have to work out how to re-engage with myself and my stitch practice. I go back to work tomorrow after 6 weeks of being signed off and you know what? It's absolutely vital, now, that I get my portfolio processed and complete enough to start presenting. I don't want to be trapped in corporate retail any longer. Neither do I want to be trapped skiring the edges of depression again being entirely un-creative, because it's a vicious circle.

So this is the latest instalment of fiddly, obsessively intricate goldwork couching  -still inspired by the labels I absent-mindedly peel of bottles in the pub, but with the wording twisted around a little. (Look closely.) Work in Progress, of course (both the embroidery and the subject matter).

Stella Artois goldwork label WIP

Lettering, logos, and if you spend long enough staring at something – I think it starts to creep into your subconscious. Something about the elaborate design of the Stella Artois logo must have appealed to me the day I dragged the bottle back from the pub and sat it on the side in my studio, where it’s waited patiently for a good month now, awaiting its inspirational purpose. Being relatively uninventive I decided to replicate the logo entirely in or nue, a task made more challenging by the swirling gold detailing and the slight drop-shadow of the lettering itself that demanded accurate capturing.

I fully recommend surrounding yourself with inspirational items and allowing them to infiltrate your creative headspace (and I’m not simply referring to the contents of said bottle.)

(life-size: 9x10xcm)

I start by drawing out the design onto the background fabric. The couching thread here’s going to be silver, which means any other areas of colour (including all the red) must be ‘coloured in’ with dense rows of stitches. By colouring in the background in the corresponding colour, not only does it give you an accurate ‘colour by numbers’ to work from, it helps disguise any minor discrepancies: deviations where the thread doesn’t couch down quite parallel, and a tiny glimpse of background is left uncovered. Threads can pass along the back of the work but I wouldn’t recommend having them loose in this manner for more than an inch or so.

After the design has been worked, the ends are plunged through to the back: potentially the trickiest section, here. After the gold band of edging, the ideal is for the silver ends to disappear exactly where the gold stitches securing them stop, for otherwise you’ll be left with nasty silver highlights at the ends of rows where they don’t belong. There are two tricks to ensure this doesn’t happen. One: when working the edges, make them as accurate and the gold curves in as smooth a line as possible. Two: a great deal of patience in needle placement when the silver is threaded up and actually plunged.

This label isn’t finished: next stage, it requires the fine black outlining around the gold leafy swirls and the trumpet. These are far too narrow to have been worked as part of the or nue, so will be added later in backstitch over the top. Then I intend to cut out and hem the entire logo, and attatch it inconspicuously to the side of the bottle. The end result shall be a bottle that at a glance looks perfectly normal, but actually has an exquisitely embroidered label that shimmers when the curve of the bottle catches the light.
And then I’m possibly going to go and drink one to celebrate.

Goldwork Script WIP

I have a real interest in text going on at the moment. If you look back to my earlier experiments in lettering (see see earlier post) you will recall I was especially interested in capturing the delicacy and detail of letters through goldwork couching and the technique of or nue.

Current experimentation follows in this train of thought, since I find myself captivated by logos in particular. The choice of font is important: in order for me to want to stitch it, it has to be at least a certain thickness (bold, thick lettering preferable over spindly characters) and – even better – a ‘drop shadow’ behind it, which adds another challenge to execute in stitch. Once you start looking around you can’t help but notice just how many signs and labels actually do have this 3D-effect to their lettering. But I digress.

(10x3.5cm)

To start with, here’s the Krispy Kreme doughnut logo: the challenge here – can I keep it at this relatively small scale, and still fit in enough detail to make the letters ‘flow’ without looking square-edged and step-like? (remember that each row’s height is dictated by the width of the silver thread you’re couching over, meaning that subtle curves are limited. Over a block ten rows deep, for instance, you can only achieve ten gradations of where you place the edge of the letter.) I think I succeeded.

The next phase of this will be to hem the edges and integrate this logo into part of a larger piece of work (a chunk of fabric worked separately and re-applied like this is called a slip.) The bigger piece shall depict a doughnut or something equally appropriate, possibly worked in Berlin wool-work velvet stitch, and this logo could feature on the napkin it’s placed on. I’m not quite decided yet.

Secondly, (9x9.5cm – the actual size on the side of the can)

The ever-recognisable Coca-Cola logo. I’m not as pleased with this one: since my red couching thread was considerably thinner than the above silver, I decided to use it two rows at a time (this would save me half the time not having to work each row individually, a luxury I couldn’t really afford if I wanted to work the entire area of the sample.) Traditionally, goldwork couching was usually done this way, holding down two strands at once to couch over: personally, I’ve always thought this just limits the scope for detail. It’s true that if I had worked one strand at a time, the curves of the letters would flow a lot smoother: but still, it’s passable.

Although the fabric is obviously stiffened by the application of all the metallic thread, it’s still fairly pliable: this logo could then be applied over a raised or padded background, moving something currently flat into 3D – an area I am very eager to explore. It’s time for or nue to start breaking some boundaries.

Applique experiments

There's only so much covering paperclips with stitch I can do at once. (Actually, the second parrot's underway, but I'm going to wait a little while until that work in progress makes it onto here.)

In the meantime, technique whore that I am, I have decided to do some dabbling into applique - the technique where pieces of fabric are cut out and applied onto a background. It's brilliant because you can create whole 'blocks' of colour without having had to previously stitch or dye them, which can then be embroidered onto as well. Pretty exciting stuff, huh.

Avian creations aside, at the moment I'm really into vintage pin-up art (more will come of that later!) alongside my ongoing interest in text:

In this example, the skin-coloured fabric was applied onto the pale yellow background, the white fabric banner applied on top of that, and THEN the hair embroidered over the top in split-stitch with the whole thing mounted in a frame for tension. (this close-up segment measures a couple of inches square) The thing I most love about applique (well, at least my method of working it) is that all raw edges get tucked underneath during the application process, leaving no fraying ends on top. (I simply can't stand fraying edges in my own work.)

NB: sadly, she isn't REALLY my girlfriend. Sigh.

Goldwork Couching

So, I've been playing around with this technique called 'Or nue' a lot lately, where goldwork threads are laid down and detailing added by the arrangement of couching stitches worked over the top.
Pretty much the best work I've ever see in this technique is done by Beryl Dean, who studied the Apprenticeship at RSN years ago (if anyone went to the 2011 Knitting and Stitching Show, there were some utterly fabulous examples of her work there.)

But back to me and my tired eyes..... these following pictures were really just personal experimentation with keeping my stitches even, how intricate I could make the lettering, and how small different fonts could go without losing the detail: (yes, I work pretty tiny)
Gold: 4cm square
Red / black: 3cm square
Plain black: 2.5cm square











And then I just couldn't leave the frame alone.....

7cm across, this is an advert for a font I stumbled across online but would make an awesome business card (it's the right size in real life)

6.5x 2.5cm -- the text came from a flyer I had lying around that read 'South Coast Tattoo'. I didn't think it was possible to get this small detail, but hey, it seemed to go okay. The way to do it is complete each horizontal line at a time, working along with a needle threaded up in each of red and black, and completing all the stitches in that row. Then you move up or down one, lay another silver string across, and carry on putting the couching stitches in place. It's got much more sparkle than this and really catches the light - you could use any couching thread you like, I guess, but this is a neat way of incorporating metallics in without having to thread them up in your needle (which is a pain at the best of times.)