Stitched Trees for ARCHITEXTURE

Stitched Trees

 
Over the last few months, I've been stitching trees.  As a member of York Embroiderers & Stitchers, who are a friendly group of stitch and textile enthusiasts of all levels of ability and experience, I am preparing for our ARCHITEXTURE exhibition later this year (27-29 June 2025 - save the date!).  As you can imagine from the exhibition title, there will be traditional and contemporary textile art on a theme of architecture alongside other 2D and 3D pieces. And some of those 3D pieces will be buildings, so I thought they might need a bit of greenery to go with them. ARCHITEXTURE is being held at the Tithe Barn in Nether Poppleton, York, YO26 6LF.  More details here.

Boro inspired trees - front

I made some tree canopy patterns of varying sizes and then cut out the tree shapes.  The fabric I used was dyed calico and backed with some iron-on vilene to stabilise the fabric for embroidery.  On the front I added some scraps of fabric in a boro patched style and then stitched them on using a variety of different stitches - running stitch, cross stitch, fly stitch, star stitch, seed stitch.  I used different types and weights of thread.  On the back of all of them I just used a running stitch, kantha style.

Boro inspired trees - back

The second set of trees I made began in the same way but on the front I did a stitch that was like an irregular darn...

"Darned" trees - front

On the back of these trees I chose a particular stitch and filled the space, sometimes varying the size of stitch and sometimes not...

"Darned" trees - back

I machine stitched the fronts to the backs although you could handstitch them, then stuffed them will toy filling, added a trunk and potted them with some yarn for soil.  

Do come along to our ARCHITEXTURE exhibition to see  all the YES members' fabulous work.