This Will Be Our Year (Took a Long Time to Come)

Tomorrow, a new collaborative show opens at Assemble Shop and Gallery in Seattle, and I'm so excited to be one of the exhibiting artists. The show is centered around the theme This Will Be Our Year (Took a Long Year to Come), after The Zombies' song. This is my contribution to the show:

Here's my artist statement for the show:

This piece is about the highs and lows of relationships, and in particular, about deciding to embrace a moment, a year, and making the most of it. I used traditional "Welcome to Our Home" cross-stitch samplers as the inspiration for this piece, since those samplers often have a prominent place on a home's wall, welcoming visitors. In this case, the piece is meant to welcome the inhabitants of a home and serve as a daily reminder, an affirmation, of the possibility of a fresh start, no matter what has come before.

The piece is 10 inches wide--it's the largest piece I've ever stitched--and is done on linen aida cloth. It took what seemed like ages to stitch, but I'm happy with how it turned out. If you're in the Seattle area, I hope you'll stop by the show; it's up until February 8.

sneak peek

cross-stitch project: silver floss

I'd heard the horror stories about working with metallic thread--"It tangles so easily!" "It's such a pain to work with!"--but I foolishly didn't believe them...until last week. A kind crafty friend generously lent me her button maker, and I decided to test it out and make a cross-stitch pinback button. Armed with blue aida cloth and silver floss, I set to work cross-stitching a c design that I'd found in a pattern pamphlet I picked up from Half Price Books. About two stitches in, problems started to occur. Strands separated, knots formed, and I missed stitches, which led to me pulling them out and starting again. Thankfully, my project was small (the button is 2 1/4" in diameter) and I finished it relatively quickly.

I love the finished button and would like to use metallic thread again--but only for small projects.

mini embroidery swap: what i sent

 

After the success of our embroidered button swap, Adaiha and I decided to do another swap. For our second go-around, we decided to make mini embroidered pieces (I used a three-inch embroidery hoop). Knowing that Adaiha liked matryoshka dolls, I stitched one up using a pattern I found in A Rainbow of Stitches, one of my favorite sources for cross-stitch and embroidery designs.

I used some mint green aida cloth that I found at a thrift store as my background, and I again used this helpful tutorial by Maximum Rabbit Designs to finish off the back, which featured a scrap piece of matryoshka fabric and a salty // oat button.