In honour of Autumn - and a friend…
In the Spring of last year, a friend of my family passed away. She was a kind, soft-spoken woman, and she was very passionate about crafts. Looking back, I think she was instrumental in igniting my own passion for crafts – a lot of my first crochet and sewing books were gifts from her, most of which I still have and use today.
Her particular favourite craft was embroidery. Whenever she would show us what she’d been working on, I would always be in awe of the intricate details she could create, adorning the fabric with a delicate dance of colourful threads and miniature beads. Even now I marvel at the patience it must have taken for her to conjure a picture or pattern from such tiny stitches.
A few months after our friend passed, we visited her neighbour, who showed us a collection of embroidery pieces she had evidently been working on before she died, and asked us if we’d like to take some home with us, as they would likely just be thrown away otherwise. So my mum, my sister and I were able to keep two pieces each.
One of the pieces I picked seemed to be unfinished. It looked like she had taken four leaves from different trees, covered their surfaces in ink and printed them onto the fabric. She’d then started to embroider around the edges and along some of the veins of the leaves.
I am often inspired by the natural world, as I know she was, and I thought it a shame to leave this piece incomplete. So I decided to try and finish it, keeping a similar style to how she started it.
The only problem was…
… I couldn’t quite figure out what she’d done! She’d been embroidering for twice, if not three times as long as I’ve been alive - with decades of experience, she’d likely learned many techniques that I have not. She used one such technique here and with stitches so small, I couldn’t see how to replicate it. All I could do was use the techniques that I did know to create as similar an effect as I could. I decided this was for the best – it would be nicer to be able to see that this was a joint project.
To this end, I also didn’t worry too much about selecting threads that were exactly the same colour as the ones my friend had used, hoping to create a subtle yet noticeable contrast between the parts that were her work and the parts that were mine.
I ended up using a combination of whipped running stitch and twilling. I began by working a line of regular running stitch, then worked backwards along the line passing the thread under each stitch in the same direction each time. While working this backwards “whipped” part of the stitch, I would add a twilling knot in the space between every few stitches.
I decided not to sew over all of the veins of each leaf; I wanted to keep some of the intricacies of the original ink printing in the completed work.
The final brown leaf in the bottom-left was the trickiest. My friend hadn’t started on this leaf at all, so I didn’t have as much to work with regarding how to shape the edges. To make matters more confusing, this particular leaf, unlike the other three, was rather asymmetrical! I thought to myself many times while working on that particular leaf how useful it would be to have the original leaf my friend used for printing so I could see how the edges might have looked, but alas, I have to improvise.
I selected a special thread for this leaf. It doesn’t show very well in these photos, but the threat my friend used for the blue leaf in the top-right has a little bit of shininess to it. I didn’t have any shiny thread in dark blue to match it, but I did have some in copper. I thought this would be the perfect choice for the brown leaf, so that the two leaves with shiny thread would be opposite each other.
When all the leaves were completed, I still felt it needed something extra. Inspired by my friend’s use of tiny beads in her other works, I added a scattering of my own in matching colours to the leaves. This also served the purpose of hiding a couple of marks that had been made on the fabric, not least that odd brown blotch in the middle.
This was something of a bittersweet project for me, but as I was working on it I found I didn’t feel sad about my friend. Instead, I felt a warmth and a gratitude for having known her and for the influence she had on my life and my interests, perhaps more than she knew. I hope she would have been pleased that I finished this work that she started, and that she would have liked the end result.
Want to make your own leaf print embroidery? Take the opportunity this autumn to go out and find some leaves you like the shape of, then get some printing ink, beads and embroidery thread and see where your imagination takes you!
Happy Crafting!
~KC🐨🧶
