History of me and my Reef Pictures

Hi everyone,

to everyone who enjoyed looking at my large underwater embroidery, and thank you all for such wonderful interest and comments.  I only ask one thing, before i begin, please dont use my ideas and work for commercial gain.  I do copyright all my own work,  in particular the underwater pictures, however, I am willing to share ideas, for people to build on from their own imaginations for their own use alone.

This is a bit of a ramble, but there are hints in among the bits and pieces of my thoughts.  The reason my blog is called twisted threads, is that reminds me of what my brain has turned into. 

My initial teacher who inspired me from the very beginning of being hopeless to keep going was Debbie Mercer who taught workshops in Gympie, and who is a beautiful embroider.  It was from her that I learned Silk Ribbon Embroidery, crazy patchwork, Brazilian embroidery and the small creative landscapes   It was through her patience and thoughtfulness that i kept going and striving to be better.  Debbie only ever gave encouraging comments about students work..she never once made anyone feel uncomfortable about what they had done...although she did tell me years later, that  at my very first class with her she did not think I would make it...but we knew each other well by that time and she was being complimentary on my progress.. My selection of fabrics for the crazy patchwork was not good..and I shudder when I look at the embroidery, but i had no idea, and kept going and learning because of her ways.

I went on to do part of a creative embroidery course with one of the guilds, and also joined an embroidery group in a nearby town to learn the more traditional techniques like schwalm, mountmellick, blackwork, and needlepainting. 

At the time I worked this particular embroidery,  I lived at a small beach community, and every Tuesday with 5 of my friends we would get together and sew, and share ideas, and laugh a lot. We shared ideas, and swapped threads, and fabrics whatever one needed if the other had it off it went.  Together we helped each other learn so much.  I really miss them in my life.  We all belonged to the local craft group there, and it was really a sad thing to say goodbye to my friends.

I had in earlier years of doing crazy patchwork  come across the work of Judith Baker Montano

and I had loved her depictions of the underwater themes , so i decided to go through my books of embroidery stitches and try to find ways to use the stitches to depict the reef also, using all sorts of threads and ribbons. and this picture below is what I came up with then, in order to make the stitch ideas my own,  and it all went from there.  I have had inspiration from other techniques in embroidery as well.

Judith  has a new book out called "Fibreart Montage" which has an extensive chapter on creating underwater projects.  I have not seen it yet, but believe it would be a great book to have as a start to creating these projects.

The big underwater Reef Garden began its life  when the Tuesday girls at my house wanted to have a go at this style.  I began by showing how I got various effects on a piece of blue dress linen, but it wasn't long before I realised I was using up valuable threads so grabbed my acrylic paints, added some fabric medium and painted a background.

The areas of deep green are velvet, which I gathered madly (a word that reappears a lot in this work) padded with some pure fleece I happened to have for softness  Because of the fleece I was able to take stitches through, or keep them on the surface....  i used various threads..I had gathered quite a variety from going to the Stitches shows, but Debbie also had her own shop in Gympie, and being an embroiderer she stocked every type of thread....and it looks like where she is a resident tutor at All Threads in Brisbane they are the same.

Now back  to the picture The plate corals are basic buttonhole needlelace on a circle of wire twisted and bent into shape after the ends of the wire are pushed through to the back and stitched on.  I even did some bullions round the edges....but with what I see of the imaginations of the ladies who run the blogsites .

i like to use lots of ribbon embroidery, and I dont even try to be gentle with it...the grasses are forever moving and that is something to try to achieve.  If you look at coral, it grows on top of the on top so that is what I try to do build and build.  If I find that I need to "push" an area forward I trapunto that area.  From one of the pictures under the Coral Reef heading you will see that i have worked a coral in fly stitch and then wrapped the branches to be various thicknesses.

You can see how I stitch the beads and stones on with gold threads to make a spiderweb effect.  I have used wired ribbon, and the gathered green bits are that hollow sort of rayon stuff that I have no idea of the name.  I just thread a tapestry needle with some thread from behind the picture, then go into the centre of the hollow and take up as much as you need before taking  the needle through and fixing it where it needs to go, cutting any surplus and stitching it down

You might notice some fluffy stitchine in the foreground this was turkey stitch,  and the looped stitch in the big picture is a piece of fancy braid which i only used the looped side.  Also you can probably tell lots of pistil stitch, woven bars and drizzle stitches.

 The whole picture took me 3 months to do....I also like painting underwater scenes, and the funny part is that I am scared of the ocean, do not go in or on boats if I can get away with it and dont go past my calves in the surf.  I was really annoyed when the children grew and I had no reason to stand or sit in the shallows....Prior to them learning to swim I had these children who were always within arms lenth as a reason for me being there with the babies while everyone else frolicked further out.    However when we lived at the beach I did like fishing in the surf, but always stayed on the edge, and i find being beside the water to have a calming effect so work that out.

All I can say is you are only restricted by your imagination and creativity and I can see both those in abundance in all the sites I have looke at and the work I admire.

Thank you so much for your interest.