I Make Things: Sometimes and Again

As with so many other things in life, I’ve noticed that there are seasons to my creative pursuits. During the spring and summer, I come out of hibernation and spend more time out of the house — gardening, thrifting, going to events. Inevitably, my art takes a backseat; both in terms of the time available to devote to it, but also my creative drive itself. Last winter, between about October and January, I worked on a LOT of hoops; I had an avalanche of ideas and my work pace was a solid trot. Since February, everything has slowed right down. Part of it has to do with the fact that a lot of the hoops I’m doing now are technically more complex than usual. But part of it is that I simply don’t have a lot of ideas floating around. It’s the embroiderer’s version of writer’s block.

I used to dread moments like that — feeling like I had run out of ideas, and what if I never got any good ideas ever again? I now know that “downtime” is part of the creative process too. I think of it as time used for recharging my creative batteries. I’ve been through this cycle enough times to know that, come fall, I will once again be brimming with ideas and fired up to bring them to life. At least, I’m pretty sure I will 😉

For now, I’ve been focusing on developing my landscape “thread painting” technique and feeling good about my progress. Here’s what I’ve been working on:

Part of my birch series, this is one of my favourites and currently in my personal collection. I love the orange pops here, and quite pleased with the texture. With each landscape hoop, I learn new “tricks” for creating texture and visual effects.

This was a big experiment for me — a different way to do the sky, and a never-before-tried technique for the clouds. It was a real challenge to get my vision to come to life. I feel like I got … about 80% there. I need to sit with this for a bit and see if ideas present themselves to me to help me improve for next time.

I loved making this style of “Klimt florals” a while ago, so I made a new design. This piece actually sold at a local art sale.

This was a relatively quick and easy project I decided to do as a “break” from my more complicated landscape hoops. The main challenge with large satin-stitch designs like this one is keeping good tension and evenness in the stitches. The main thing is ensuring each section of satin stitch isn’t too large and has a consistent stitch direction. The flowers here were the most difficult, because they required a bit of tweaking to keep that direction consistent.

Ok, I know I saw this a lot but this is hands-down one of my favourite hoops ever. I am so, so pleased with how everything turned out: the colours, the texture, the overall composition. I tried a new technique with the pine trees — a combination of felt and French knots — which turned out extremely well.

As you can see, I used the same technique here, albeit this time not in silhouette. This was a very time-consuming hoop because it’s almost completely thread-painting, but I am happy with it. I have wanted to do a coastal landscape for a while — I love embroidering bodies of water — and the colour palette here was different than things I’d worked on before.