Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Samhain Redwork

I always get so excited by the myriad of crafting opportunities presented by Samhain (Halloween, for us in the Southern Hemisphere this rightly falls on 30th April). I love all the imagery associated with it - the ghosties, witches, pumpkings, black cats, bats, spiders. Nothing too scary though!

While browsing on the net a couple of months ago I saw some examples of Redwork, and found the use of a single colour, particularly the strong blood red, very striking (and apt for Samhain).

Redwork is a style of embroidery which became popular in the 1800s with the introduction of a colourfast red thread from Turkey. Prior to that, threads had not been colourfast in the wash and could not be used to decorate every day items. You can find more info on redwork and some free patterns at Redwork.info.

There are so many shades of red embroidery floss available. I chose DMC304 which is quite a dark red. I didn't use a pattern, instead I traced a child's "colour in" picture from the internet directly onto my embroidery cloth. This was my first attempt at an embroidery of this size, I have done one other small one of a bird on DS9mths sun hat.

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