Emillie Ferris is hands down my favorite embroidery designer right now. I love all of her patterns and somehow made it my goal to create all of them. Her sense of color is fantastic, and I just love to play around with the patterns. Her newest stitching project, the magical moth friend, had my attention immediately, and I had to embroider it!
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I usually don’t like to follow patterns because I tend to make up my own. That is why, for every pattern I do follow, I try to use a technique or material I have not tried yet or so something different.
You can buy the embroidery pattern for the Magical Moth Friend used in this project in Emillie’s Etsy shop.
The embroidery pattern changes
Sun-printed fabric
The fabric for this embroidery is sun-printed with cuttings from my garden. I made this for this moth pattern to add a bit more extra. Als, I really wanted to do sun-printing, haha.
Stumpwork
The wings are made with wired slips – which I did for the first time and it was SO terrifying to cut out the fabric!
Trying out stumpwork embroidery
The stumpwork part was the most exciting one. This Stumpwork class over on Domestika has helped me a lot to understand the process and also have more in-depth explanations. The instructor, Shan Xu, provides incredible knowledge of stumpwork and gives lots of tips and tricks. The course is in English but has subtitles for many other languages like German, Spanish and Portuguese.
My inner perfectionist still has a problem with how the wire joins the moth on the fabric yet. And then I had to remind myself that it is my first time doing this and it is looking good for that!
Sometimes, we just have to say shut up to that inner critic, don’t we?
If you are playing around with the idea to try out stumpwork – or any other technique that looks daunting to you right now, give it a try! Also, maybe don’t do it in a project that includes so many hours of stitching. When I did the moth wings, it was really terrifying to cut them because so much time and effort went into stitching these. Had I done a simple petal flower pattern like they often use when teaching this technique, I might have been a bit more relaxed.
Previous Projects
Here are the other projects from Emillie Ferris’ patterns I did over the past months. (she is not paying me to write about her work, I’m just a huge fangirl of her embroidery patterns and buy all of them by myself)
Butterfly Pattern
My first pattern by Emillie and my first neede painting project. Read more about it here.
Mushroom pattern
I did this one double the size and it was a challenge to get all those red stitches done 😀
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