sweet skulls…

here it is.  there was much pain and foul language and waving around of arms near the end, but after somewhere between 5 and 8 hours (i have almost no sense of time, which i attribute to acute adhd) it is complete!

it’s on the left side (left if you’re the one wearing it, right if you’re not) of the front of a zip-up hoody.  go ahead, compare it the original. I’m not very happy with my personal rendering of the original piece, but i like my version in its own right. I’ve learned a few things:

• Urban Threads has a thread list with the posting.  use it.  or else. or else you’ll end up with purple shading on your red roses.  i feel like such a retard.
• Start at the beginning of the day and just keep going. no matter what.  at least ALWAYS finish the color.  getting back to the middle of a skull after giving up and shutting it down the night before was past painful and resulted in that stray line around the back of the head on the bottom skull.  Who knew it would take upwards of 8 hours to stitch out a design that cost $1?!
• I have an option to baste around the pattern before I started… i reeeeally should have done that…

anyways, i classify it as a disappointment, but not so much that i won’t wear it proudly.  after this one I did another one:

it’s beautiful and shiny and centered on the back of a hoody. after I finished it i got the idea to do some sleeves… maybe some stars? 😀

more wip wip wip… will this project ever end?

I think this is the longest embroidery project I’ve ever done… I worked on it for what must have been a couple of hours last night and it’s still not finished!  But anyways, here’s an update:

wip wip wip

Here is a peak at what I was working on last night…

Yes, that’s a skull and those are roses.  Take a look at the detail on the roses:

Texture on the roses is created by not only the direction and length of the stitches, but by layering the stitches as well.  This is going to be one gorgeous piece! Thank you http://www.urbanthreads.com/ , who is by the way having a tremendous sale right now… all of their most popular designs for 2010 are just $1!  And don’t forget to check out their free design!  Did you know that they also have hand embroidery AND digital stock? I ❤ Urban Threads!

oooooh, shiny!

this project has been under wraps for a while:

It was originally meant to be a pin-cushion, but I went a little crazy… I couldn’t help it, the pins and buttons were just screaming at me to be involved.  I found the skull ribbon in the Halloween clearance bin and I just knew!  Red thread tied it all together in one big, skully… I don’t know.  I thought it could be a really giant pin-cushion, but then I decided to let the gift-ee decide.  We settled on it being a bag for sewing things, and I have the perfect thing to line the inside with…

The embroidered design is from Urban Threads and this was my first attempt at using the shiny metallic thread. The lady at the fabric store scared me when I purchased it, telling me that I should use different needles and this lubricant that she sold me and this special bobbin thread and about a half dozen things that I don’t even remember now. I decided to just give it a shot to start, with a normal embroidery needle and just set my machine on “slow”… and everything turned out beautifully. It tangled and broke about the same amount as any other thread, actually, probably less because I had it on slow!