My first profession – embroidery

As I already hinted on my about page, I am not only a pattern designer and graphic designer, but also educated in tailoring and embroidery and – for the sake of completeness – also a (fantasy) romance author, but that’s another story :-).
(If I’ve made you curious, here’s the link to my German author page).

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

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

Today I want to show you my biggest and most elaborate own pieces from earlier times. 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 interest you about it? Feel free to leave me a comment with your question.

The “Tree of life” is 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 greatest work is this one which I made for my second examination in embroidery. A bedspread made of hand-painted silk embroidered with a variety of techniques and materials – titled “The Big Bang”. It is inspired by the idea of the origin of the universe and depicts the planets of our solar system. It took about three hundred and eighty hours to complete.