Rachel’s Picture

I made this embroidery for a good friend who loves bright colours. It was based on a blurry old photo I found of the herbaceous border, taken at the height of summer, when the planting was at its most exuberant and the colours strongest.

I edited the image which resulted in a more colourful, abstract, stronger result. I created a background of plain coloured shapes, which related to the main underlying colours in the photo. As detail, I added randomly cut squares which I scattered, layered and spaced to highlight the intensity of the colours in the border.

I was happy with the result so far, but felt the whole piece lacked movement and textural variety. So I connected the whole piece by using very simple backwards and forwards machine stitching in matching and contrasting colours.