Embroidery - Party Cat!

It's Party Time

Besides doing a bit of needlework in Vacation Bible School when I was eight or so, I don't have any experience with embroidery or its ilk.  I remember we learned french knots.  I remember I made a super cool M&M's mobile out of felt, but that's about it.

I was seeing some lovely embroidery over at Aneela Hoey's website and started looking into it more the last couple of weeks.  Since I've also been seeing lots of sewing/quilting/craft books I wanted to get, but money is a finite resource, I figured I'd check out some of them out before deciding if I want to buy them or not.  So I finally sucked it up and got my first library card in 8 years.

My local library carries a pretty small selection of crafty books apparently, but I got the one embroidery book they had KYUUTO! Japanese Crafts Woolly Embroidery which wasn't particularly useful in the way that I find it unlikely I'll start using wool or making puffy little hedgehogs and flowers, but it had  a ton of different stitches in the back, and that along with web resources gave me plenty of information to work with.

I find some of the stitches challenging from a left handed perspective, but I was really excited that after spending about 20 minutes playing around with different ones, I felt ready to tackle an actual project.   I'm looking forward to doing something pretty at some point, but after thinking of line drawings I could go off of, I figured nothing could be more awesome than my favorite comic, Party Cat (!!!) Anybody with cats should appreciate the entire series. Anybody without cats should feel lucky after reading it.

So although I didn't get all the details exactly right, and I have no idea how I am going to frame or otherwise display this (though likely I'll attach it to a wood block), I had fun trying out a few different things, especially the woven wheel stitch for the eyes.  I am disappointed only in that  "It's Party Time"was perfectly legible when it was on the hoop, and it's a bit distorted now.  Then again perhaps I could've used something more appropriate than a leftover sheet to doodle on ;)