"Spaceman" (Nothing But You)
This project was the very first self-drafted embroidery design and project I created. I picked up embroidery as a hobby (and later on as a freelancing opportunity) at the beginning of the pandemic and created this piece in March 2020. A also created a sweatshirt featuring this design in May 2020. This is the first of three projects I created inspired by Oh Wonder's 3rd studio album, No One Else Can Wear Your Crown. I decided to pick up a new craft and created this project featuring an astronaut and lyrics from an Oh Wonder song entitled "Nothing But You." The storyline of the song focuses on the narrator falling in love with an astronaut, hence the subject of the piece being an astronaut.
To start off the project, I used my iPad to design the astronaut and figure out the placement of main elements. Below is the final design I used as a guide for where to place my stitches. Because this was my first project and I was not fully aware of all materials I could have used to transfer my design onto the black fabric, I used a yellow wax transfer paper as you can see from the photo on the right. This was not the most effective method of design transfer because the wax substance progressively rubbed off while stitching and I had to re-transfer the design 1-2 times. For later projects, I discover printable, water-soluble stabilizer paper which would have been best to use in this instance.
total of 6 different colors were used within this project; their DMC color codes and names are as follows- 824 (blue very dark), 826 (medium), 827 (blue very light), 742 (tangerine light), and black and white. If I wanted to add more depth to a certain part of the space suit, I used a darker color.
I played around with the thickness of the thread because I noticed stitches with too many pieces of floss looked too bulky to use within a detailed piece, so I used two pieces of floss folded in half, resulting in stitches that are 4 strands thick. Certain parts such as the helmet outline were created using 2 strand-thick stitches. As this project was my first ever embroidery piece, I simply treated the thread as if it was a pencil and I was coloring in spaces with multiple strokes. The direction of the stitch was determined by how I would shade in the area with my pencil, typically long areas would not be shaded with few long strokes but more shorter strokes. This technique can be shown in the progress photos.
Stitching the text was experimental but I used the same technique I used before and used very small "strokes" to create the outline for each letter. The more stitches that are used to follow an edge, the softer the curvature, so letters such as "O" and "A" required more smaller stitches than letters such as "I" and "L."
This piece was made available for purchase online through my Etsy shop. The band whose song inspired this piece purchased this one of a kind project. Below is a photo of the piece within their recording studio in London.
This design was also recreated on a handful of sweatshirts as commissions for customers. The design size was slightly increased to accommodate the front of a sweatshirt, a planet was added onto the right shoulder, and my name was added onto the left cuff.
