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Stitch palettes or swatches - creating a vocabulary of colour and stitch
Swatches
- Most embroiderers love fabric and paint swatches. The concept of stitch palettes
or swatches as another form of sampler suggests an ideal format for creating
a palette or swatch that combines stitches with colour.
The
design for the swatches needs to be a fairly simple division of space as the
main purpose of the sampler is to show colour and stitch. Space divisions may
be extracted from a Design Resource. One type of Design Resource is to draw
or trace outlines of your favourite flowers, landscape or other shapes from
your sketchbook, magazines or cuttings.
Mark
the outlines boldly with black felt pen. The Design Resource may then be enlarged
or reduced on the photocopier to give a range of different sizes from which
to uplift space divisions through a window made of card or board. I chose a
regular shape 75 x 48 mm (3 x 2 in.) with rounded corners. Other shapes are
squares, triangles, circles, diamonds, ovals, etc.
Place
the window over different parts of the design and select sections from the design
source. Trace them onto tracing paper and transfer them to fabric.
Choose
a few of your favourite stitches to work with, select a palette of different
types of threads and start stitching.
Remember
the advice from the first sampler - it's for fun, it doesn't matter how the
back looks, don't be precious, don't unpick, relax and enjoy.
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Palettes
of pattern, stitch and colour - Many of us are aware that embroidery has a mind
of its own and, while design and planning is a necessary pre-requisite, once
embroidery is applied to the surface, it interacts firstly with the fabric and
then with other stitch applications. Constant re-assessment is needed to determine
the next stitch and the next colour, even though a pre-plan has already been
mapped out. I decided to extract patterns from the Design Resource and combine
stitch and colour variations to test them prior to commencing the work. I was
so pleased with the result that the palette became part of the finished work.
I must confess that sometimes a palette can't be finished until after the embroidery
is complete. Embroiderers must be flexible and prepared for any eventuality.
Effie Mitrofanis is a professional embroiderer who lives in Australia. She has a passionate interest in the art, pattern and texture of embroidery, its history, its makers and techniques. Effie has exhibited in Japan and France and has given workshops throughout Australia and New Zealand. She has written four books.
This article is from The World of Embroidery, Volume 49 No.5, © Effie Mitrofanis.
highlights from September 1998 issue