Eye Eye!

This week’s post is something I’ve wanted to attempt for over a year, since I went on my first free-motion embroidery course with Alison Holt.  I fancied trying to stitch a picture of my cat’s eye and the summer challenge from the Chairwoman of my textile group to make something using textiles featuring animals gave me the impetus to get going with it.

After overthinking the project, trying to think of the problems I might encounter, I finally just got on with it and figured I’d address them as they arose.  To start, I traced the picture, added gutter to define the sections and then painted with silk paints.  As you can see, the eye was dismal so here was problem one to overcome.  I didn’t want to stitch the eyeball as I wanted it to have a smoother texture.

I decided to cut out the eye and do it with some other media.  I snipped the fabric, folded it back to the inside and then stuck the fabric down onto a sheet of self-adhesive dissolvable stabiliser and traced the eyeball onto some pastel mat paper.  The hole for the eyeball was sticky from the stabiliser so I stuck a single layer of tissue paper over that.

The eyeball was coloured using Faber-Castel Polychromos pencils.

Once the fabric was mounted in an embroidery hoop, I selected my thread colours, dropped the feed dogs on the machine and started to stitch, using the reference picture on my iPad to guide me.  The layers were built up in different shades of black, grey, beige, brown and white, pretty much like cat fur is.

After completing the bottom half of the picture, the fabric was repositioned in the hoop and I stitched the top section.  Once completed, I soaked the piece in cool water.

Obviously, the water wasn’t cool enough as the whole piece shrank.  AARGH!  Time to overcome problem number two.  I marked out the size of the aperture of the mount in my frame and carefully applied black silk paint all around the edges.  I then started the process of stitching the sections all around the outside of the panel.  As the piece had shrunk, so had the hole for the eyeball so my carefully coloured panel was now too big.  Hello problem number three!  I drew around the hole for the eyeball onto tracing paper, scaled the photo on my iPad so the eyeball was the same size and traced the pupil and reflection.  This was transferred onto pastel mat and I coloured the smaller eyeball.

After mounting the mat and fabric onto a self-adhesive sheet (made specifically for embroidery), the piece was framed.  I’m really pleased with how well this turned out. 

After the time I’d spent colouring the first eyeball, I didn’t want to throw it away so I finished the drawing and stuck it in my art journal.