My first profession – embroidery

As I already hinted on my about page, I am not only a pattern designer and graphic designer, but also a trained dressmaker and embroiderer and – for the sake of completeness – also a (fantasy) romance author, but that’s another story :-).
(If I’ve piqued your curiosity, here’s the link to my German author page).

My first profession of all was embroidery. Parament and flag embroidery to be precise – an ancient craft.

During my apprenticeship, I worked on traditional Bavarian club flags and paraments for the church. Everything was embroidered by hand from a wide variety of materials.
I liked the more modern work best, which allowed for a wide range of creative techniques. I practiced the profession for a total of seven years, interrupted by an apprenticeship as a dressmaker, and I have to say that I still love it, even if I have neglected it somewhat in recent years.

Today, I would like to show you my largest and most elaborate pieces from my earlier days. Maybe I will revive the profession in combination with my patterns in the near future :-). I have already started a first test with my pre-printed embroidery templates.

What about you? Have you already discovered your passion for embroidery? What would you like to know about it? Feel free to leave me a comment with your question.

The “Tree of life” is hand embroidered on hand-painted silk. The techniques used are needle painting, stem and satin stitch, split stitch, sewn-on webs, friseé and Japangold. The working time was around eighty hours.

The following embroidery is called “Garden of Eden”. In this embroidery, appliqué, beading, bouillon embroidery and knot stitch were added to the embroidery techniques as listed above for the “Tree of Life”. The working time for this artwork was about forty hours.

But my biggest piece is this one that I made for my second exam in embroidery. A bedspread made of hand-painted silk, embroidered with different techniques and materials, entitled “The Big Bang”. It is inspired by the idea of the origin of the universe and shows the planets of our solar system. It took around three hundred and eighty hours to complete.