I made a number of embroidered chambray shirts; the one with the cutest story associated with it is now in a private collection. (That's a fancy way of saying I gave it to an English teacher because I got too fat to wear it and she thought it was really cool.) That one had a monarch butterfly embroidered on the sleeve, which my mother tried to brush off, because she thought it was real.
This shirt has a more prosaic history: like many people who read too many novels I have a fantasy world peopled by a number of characters; and after making the first two brothers tall, gorgeous, and dark, I was getting a bit bored with perfection, and made the third delicate, slightly plump and blonde. Naturally he turned out to be by far the most interesting. However, still being quite young, I made up for this burst of reality by making his wife, depicted here, impossibly gorgeous. (And got my comeupance when he fell in love with his plain sister-in-law, married to one of the hunks. Characters never do what you expect.)
18nov2001, Nikon E990, 1/100s, f4.1 EV0. Cropped
I started this series of shirt while in high school, & had by this time discovered DMC and some embroidery stitches besides stem, chain, and satin–the hearts served as samplers for experimentation.
The original shot of this was wretchedly dark. When I updated, since I had a camera that would do closeups, I figured I might as well depict my amateurish stitches in all their glory. One traditional method for handling large areas of stitches is with long and short stitch, which is also used for color blending. Having had no formal training in embroidery, I developed this “paint-by-number” approach instead. Though my stitch quality has improved (somewhat) and I've been exposed to the “correct” method since, I still like and use this approach. (I also knot my threads, another big no-no.)
DMC and J&P Coats six strand cotton embroidery floss on a chambray shirt. Probably made in the late 70s. Collection of the artist. 18nov2001, Nikon E990, 1/54s, f5.0 EV0; out of the box
04sep2020: Restored full-size versions of images, added captions & all tags except ‘embroidery’
Unless otherwise noted, text, image and objects depicted therein copyright 1996--present sylvus tarn.
