[Pastimes] Embroidered Pouch

Hey Everyone, 
During the time when I was heavily into embroidery, I wanted to make a pouch to carry pens and other stationery to my classes when I was teaching. Having worked on the design for a while I was able to create a design with which I was quite happy and satisfied. The design is inspired from heena design. You can see my other designs inspired from heena here. If you notice, I have used the Paisley motif here as well... cannot design without using one! Here is the design...

[Pastimes] Embroidered Tunic Neckline

This was an embroidery done on neckline of a kurta (Indian Tunic), which I did for one of my friends. This was again inspired by embroidery of Gujarat. I like this embroidery because of the riot of colours that can be included in the work. So, most of my pieces are influenced by it. You may like to read more on Gujarat Embroidery here.

The stitches used for this work are Open and Closed Herringbone stitch, Chain stitch, Running stitch, Buttonhole stitch and Sequin work.

Hope you like this embroidered neckline... do leave a comment to let me know!

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[Pastimes] Embroidered Wall Piece

This wall piece is inspired from the embroidery of Gujarat, a Western Indian State. India, being such a huge country with so many different cultures, traditions, arts and crafts; each state of India has its own art and cultural tradition. The embroidery from Gujarat is very colourful and the skill of the embroiderer lies in mixing different colours together. The reason for including so many colours is the Geographical location of the state, which is a desert and lack colours of nature in the form of trees, plants, flowers, water bodies etc. All the lack of colour is compensated for in the clothes and art form. 

The wall piece is made on ivory casement fabric with embroidery done in bright colours. The stitches used are open and closed herringbone stitch, chain stitch, buttonhole stitch and satin stitch. Three different motifs are used. These motifs are also picked up from the motifs of Gujarat embroidery.

Embroidered Wall piece

Motif 1

Motif 2

Motif 3

Hope you like this wall piece... do leave a comment to let me know!

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[Pastimes] Embroidered Designs

Hi everyone!
When you are creating a design, inspiration could be anything- an incident in your life, some artwork, nature etc. Different things inspire me at different times and then I try to combine it with another one of my passions and create something. Having a fascination for various arts and specially the Indian Traditional arts and crafts, once I got inspired by the Mehandi (Heena) designs. In India, two types of Heena techniques are popular- The Arabic and the Indian. The Arabic designs are characterized by floral motifs with inclusion of birds like peacock but there are no human faces or bodies as evident in Indian mehandi designs. Another feature of distinction among the two designs is the placement of motifs.The Arabic designs are spaced apart, while Indian designs are placed as close as possible almost covering the complete hand or feet, the common body parts for mehandi application. Colour also is significantly different as Indian Mehandi is red to dark brown or even blackish brown in colour (made by mixing ground mehandi leaves, tea leaves, gooseberries or amla, clove or laung etc.), whereas the arabic mehandi is commonly done in black colour (obtained by mixing hair dye or synthetic dye in henna powder) with brown filling. Some examples of heena designs are

Sample of Indian Heena Design (Image Credits:beauty.fashpages.com )

Sample of Arabic Heena Design (Image Credits:www.heenadesigns.org)

With Heena as inspiration, I created this set of eight motifs. A motif is a design which is used as a decoration or as part of an artistic pattern. These motifs are embroidered using variety of stitches like satin stitch, chain stitch, stem stitch, buttonhole stitch, filling stitch, running stitch etc. The main forms used are again my favorite peacock and paisleys and a combination of two.

Hope you like my creations... do leave a comment to let me know!

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[Pastimes] Initials on Handkerchief...

There was a time when I was obsessed with embroidery. It was vacation time in schools and universities and I used to be at home for most of the days and those were the days when I embroidered for around 10-12 hours a day. 

I decided to embroider Initials on Mr. Scientist's handkerchief and surprise him. So I sat down with my PC to select a nice font for the same and within an hour I had my design ready and so I embroidered his initial (Y) by the time he came back from work. I used satin stitch, stem stitch and french knots for this design.

Later in the evening, pleased with my work, I told him that I have something for him and showed him the handkerchief and the reaction I got was something I never imagined. He was like, 'It's good but why there is no 'N' (my Initial) here? We are together and hence, with my name, your name should be there always, so I would like if you do something with both Y and N in it...' 

For a while, I did not know how to react, I was pleased by the significance I hold in his life and also a bit upset about beginning the whole design process again. But next day with CorelDraw software, I created Y and N, and this is what I finally embroidered using satin stitch and stem stitch.

How do you like these? Do leave a comment and let me know...

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You may also like to read my post on doodles here or on embroidered bookmarks here

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[Pastimes] Love for Reading and Embroidery!

My love for books and needle & thread once lead me into creating embroidered bookmarks. I really enjoyed making these bookmarks and used my favorite embroidery stitch- satin stitch. This I feel is the trickiest stitch as those who love it can work very well with this and those who don't really like it can get this really messy. 

The motifs are inspired from Parsi Embroidery, which is a very fine and delicate form of embroidery, using mainly satin stitches, long and short stitches, french knot etc. 
White cotton fabric was used as base and cotton embroidery threads were used to create design. After completing the embroidery, the fabric was sandwiched between a layer of colored paper and cellophane paper and was finished with a border of coloured paper.

Hope you like the two bookmarks... and if like me you also love reading and needlework, why not create some of your own. And if you do, don't forget to share the pics with all of us here!

Till then, 

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