Mushroom Embroidery Study

Culture & Context

This piece was created a few weeks into my first year of art school, it took me only a few hours to do, as I had a deadline to meet that afternoon and had forgotten to take this piece home with me. Therefore, out of sheer panic, I was somehow able to do what should have been at least a day’s work into a single morning. This is probably why the hemming I did is so wonky.

This was early in my journey in using embroidery for art and I wanted to see if I could use it as a medium for realism, or at least semi-realism. Only a couple months prior I had found a copy of “The Oxford Book of Flowerless Plants” by F.H. Brightman and B.E. Nicholson (1966) in an Oxfam in Aberdeen. I felt it would be good to try and see if I could replicate the style of drawing in this book as a way to bridge this gap in my skill set. The mushrooms in my embroidery are not identical to those in the book, this is deliberate. Firstly I had my own desires in terms of how I wanted the image to look.  Secondly, I didn’t want to copy the images but to use them as a reference for my own practice, so things were adjusted to my learning requirements. The bottom row shows the basic outline of the images while the top is the fully fleshed-out illustration.

Process & Production

Satin stitch blends similar colors together to create a blended appearance.

Recipe Details

DMC embroidery floss on Calico.