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rikerssexblouse · 27 days

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#I loled

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rikerssexblouse · 3 months

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Andrew Robinson on playing Garak for the first time.

#Andrew Robinson is such a gift

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rikerssexblouse · 3 months

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Fox Mulder Flirting Tactics 101 (tweet)

#laugh rule #The X-Files

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rikerssexblouse · 3 months

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Oh my God, Rikerssexblouse! That salamander embroidery is just stunning!

Did you do it freehand? Or did you have some kind of instruction because if I wanted to take up embroidery before - I now need to do it! 😂🦎💕

Thank you! It was not freehand, and this was actually my first attempt doing one that wasn’t out of a kit. Before this I’d only bought kits on amazon or Etsy, which is nice because you get everything you need, plus instructions. But for a while I’ve wanted to do something of my own design, but I hadn’t quite figured out how. So since it would have been useful for me when I was trying to figure this out, I’m going to explain the whole process. And to be clear, I’m just figuring this out, so maybe people have other strategies, but it worked for me.

First, I took a screenshot of the salamander babies poking out of the hole and opened it up in Procreate. I am not at all experienced with Procreate (my 9 year old is better with Procreate than I am), but I created a second layer, and then drew on the second layer to outline the image. That looked like this:

Then I hid the layer with the screenshot, so you only saw the outline. It looked like this:

Then I printed it out.

Michaels has little squares of fabric for embroidery, so I bought two of those, one white and one purple.

It’s probably overpriced for the amount of fabric you get? But it’s a very convenient size for one embroidery project and it’s just two bucks.

But then I had to transfer the pattern to the fabric. This meant that I had to lay the fabric on the printoff and trace it with a special pen. I used this one.

It’s water soluble, so you can rinse the marks right out when you are done.

The problem I ran into, was that the purple was much too dark to see through to be able to trace, so I had to use the white (I just thought the purple would be more fun but dark colors won’t work well with this strategy). Then I was just filling in the shapes from my pattern. After I was done, I took it out of the hoop, rinsed it in water to rinse away the blue pen marks, pressed it between towels overnight, then put it back on the hoop and tied it up the back.

I think figuring out what stitches to use were might actually be the hardest part. It’s a combination of your vision/creativity and just enough experience with the stitches that you can visualize what they will look like. I used satin stitches (to fill in the big spaces like the salamander babies’ faces and the rocks), lazy daisy stitches (the nostrils), stem stitches (for the outlines), and about a thousand million french knots (the moss). Oh and straight stitches for the letters.

The salamander babies’ heads were hard, because I had to work around the spots and eyes and everything. The hole might be the part I’m most proud of, because my plan to give it depth actually worked. Instead of doing a satin stitch to fill it in smooth, I did straight stitches and arranged them directionally (into the middle and then down) to try to give it shape so you could see how the the hole goes down into the ground. I also used a little gray in between the black to give it some dimension.

The french knots that made up the knots aren’t particularly hard (although I do suggest finding a YouTube video to see how to do it, I could NOT figure it out from written instructions when I first started) but it used up SO MUCH more thread than I ever anticipated. Doing a kit, you get everything you need, but I didn’t know what I needed. Whoops. So I had some last minute panic about running out of thread (literally the night before Threshold Day). So a lot of the color variation is a matter of necessarily rather than my plan. But it worked out well.

If you look closely, the moss on the left has a lot more color variation than the moss on the right, and that is because I was running out of thread. But it’s not too noticeable (hopefully). I do love how the moss looks though! French knots are usually used for little details, but the mass of them gives it so much texture. I love it.

I will say, if you are trying it for the first time, don’t start by doing your own design. Follow a kit and figure out what you are doing first. And don’t be afraid to look up YouTube videos when you can’t figure out how to do something. Video is a MUCH better teacher than words can ever be, in this context. But at the same time, there really isn’t anything that difficult about embroidery. You mostly just have to be patient. I find it quite relaxing.

#reblogging at a sane time of day #in case anyone is interested #embroidery #Threshold Day

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