Stitched Surface

In my last post, I mentioned that I could envision doing a lot of embroidery on the surface of the quilt. I was thinking about that and decided to post this quilt, because this is the first quilt I made where I experimented with densely stitching the top. I made this piece as a commission and initially was just going to piece and machine quilt it. At the time, I was learning a lot of embroidery stitches, mostly from Erica Wilson's fabulous book, Erica Wilson's Embroidery. This book dates back to the seventies and isn't exactly eye candy, but it is chock full of stitches and the instructions are very clear. Anyway, I used this quilt top as a sampler of sorts. Piecing the top only took me a couple of weeks, but all the embroidery ended up taking several months. I loved it though; both the finished product and the process. I found the stitching even more relaxing and meditative than knitting. And it too was extremely portable. I can't imagine doing that amount of stitching on most quilts I make because it is so time consuming, but I really enjoyed exploring this technique and am really looking forward to doing some more.