it recently struck me that letting things hang around without considering or reflecting on them leaves an accountability loophole. “there was nothing to remind me so i forgot to investigate/work on/maintain it.” want to avoid that, when possible. thought i’d follow Tuesday’s u-turn with another project hidden away in cold storage before it gets too old: this house portrait embroidery.

i “finished” the embroidery part late last year in November and swiftly moved on to other things. originally conceived as part of a larger quilt project – a collection of house portrait embroideries – i haven’t made progress on and am becoming less tied to as time passes. with no plans for what to do next, i’m going to keep it in its raw state for a little while longer – no rush. but it would be nice to see this embroidery, and any project for that matter, in a somewhat diegetic context. without further ado, here’s an account of things up to this point:

when i started this embroidery i had just left my office job. this project felt like the inaugural step toward investigating my independent creative practice, and what that could look like. this embroidery also allowed me to reconnect with photos i’d taken earlier in the year and the early months of shelter-in-place.

a lot of my recent photos were taken on walks – neighborhood photos, houses mostly. in the early weeks of shelter-in-place walks were almost daily, and taking photos helped me feel connected to the physical character of the neighborhood while being physically isolated. i like to refer to them as “house portraits.” i’ve come across several house portraits that lent themselves to line drawn renderings and, i thought, embroidery. one had bright red and freshly painted concrete steps standing out against a well manicured but otherwise unremarkable façade. it was simple with a pop of color – a good place to start.

i used one, two, and three strands of DMC cotton embroidery floss in black (310) for most of the outlining, DMC red (321) for the feature red stair, and black Gütermann all purpose polyester thread for the shadow hatch and details. used only outlining stitches – most being less-than-well executed back-stitch. more like forth-back-stitch – it’s a bit of a mess…

i’m happy with how the outline embroidery turned out. the stairs were too small to attempt shading them, that came later…

there was a lot of unused fabric beneath the first hoop, so i put another hoop on it. thought i could do a blow-up embroidery of the pathway, steps, and porch. using the light table and an enlarged print of the photo, i traced the stair onto water-soluble stabilizer using a fine-tip permanent marker (which will be important later). started with two coral reds (350 & 351) for the path and sunlit step risers. used a light pinky-peach for the treads, and i cannot remember what i used for the shaded portion of the step. i think it was garnet? i don’t know…

i completely lost track of which browns, beiges, and taupes i used for shading the walls. some were DMC, and others were from a cheapy pack of embroidery floss i ordered from Amazon several years ago. the colors are ok, but none of the skeins had labels or identified the color. it’s a toss-up really…

practiced satin stitch and long-and-short stitch techniques to achieve the shading. it’s a little goofy and there are flaws, but i learned from it.

there were several helpful takeaways that i’ve since been able to apply to my other embroidery projects. the ones i can remember are:

do NOT use permanent marker for design transfer - i realized the consequences of this after washing away the stabilizer from the stair shading and the permanent ink had bled into the lighter thread fibers. that was a bummer – won’t be doing that again. i’ll stick to pencils and Frixon pens in the future.
use stabilizer for stabilizing – don’t do the permanent marker thing on the water-soluble stuff… do use fusible stabilizer to provide structure to lighter fabrics for a crisper, more defined finish.
use the shading hatch to compliment geometry - try stitching the shading lines parallel to the plane of the material the shadow is being cast upon. i was going to try to stick with just written explanation of what i mean by this, but here’s a sketch:

the shading beneath the eaves illustrates this best. i was unsure about shading the outriggers, but this is close to what i was thinking. the hedge shading is tricky too, and i don’t particularly like how i outline embroidered edges that could have … — the shading beneath the eaves illustrates this best. i was unsure about shading the outriggers, but this is close to what i was thinking. the hedge shading is tricky too, and i don’t particularly like how i outline embroidered edges that could have been more softly rendered in a hatch. just a thought…

work shaded fills from the farthest area of the image forward – in the case of the stair detail piece, i should have started at the far wall of the porch and door and worked my way forward toward the steps and path. if i were to shade any of the shrubs, i would shade the wall behind them first and then the shrubbery over top to build more realistic depth. make sense?

try different shading stitches - the steps look kind of furry due to the nature of long and narrow stitch shading i tried to use. i’m still learning the technique, so i’m by no means blaming the technique for the muppet-y nature of that portion. seed stitch could be cool to try. or hatch lines like the larger piece. i don’t know, experiment! try different sh-t!

a technique i learned after “finishing” this was how to embroidery without leaving any knots! i’ve used that technique on all embroidery projects since – so much tidier. i learned that and other techniques from Sarah Homfray’s youtube videos – she has so many fantastic tutorials.

there are a few more house portraits i’ve considered embroidering. houses with neat facades or a sweet feature and otherwise straightforward geometry. should there be a next time, i’d probably start off larger and try to execute more detail in one single embroidery rather than splitting it up into two – which wasn’t planned – but i’m happy with the direction it went.

yesterday afternoon i wrapped the quilting portion of another project – one that hadn’t yet been flung from its spinning plate… (alright, beat it with that hateration!)

the process has been going well so far. not that things are perfect – no – but i’m learning, moving somewhere, and getting better at testing ideas and identifying what i like and don’t like in whatever it is i happen to be working on. in this case: leaving expectations at the door and adapting to what unfolds. i’m learning to recognize successes yielded while executing a process, and to relieve pressure created from the notion that success is singular and lies within a very narrow margin.

i went into this most recent project with a much more involved and technical execution in mind. i’d also procrastinated working on it for months… in an effort to be more efficient with my time and allow attention to be paid to other projects – and life – i simplified. in doing so, i saw shared sensibilities with previous projects and drawings. maybe it’s subconscious… still worth a mention.

anyway, i need to photograph it in the state it’s in right now – post-quilting – before moving to the next step, and wanted to leave a dash of what i’m coming away with so far.

keep it going!

this old house