What Are You Working On? is for all things hand-made, home-made, and creative in a variety of mediums.
Stumpwork is a type of embroidery that gives a 3 dimensional effect. It makes the embroidery seem more realistic. The effect can be done through stitches, like ribbons stitches, that in themselves give a 3D effect, or through padding an object—like a pear to make it seem more 3D. The padding can be done with stitches — several layers of stitches, or by using felt to raise up the design. That is what I am going to focus on here. A Stumpwork pear made more realistic with two layers of base padding. It is one aspect of an embroidery, Partridge in a Pear Tree designed by Kim Sanders. I took a Zoom class from her two weeks ago.
I am still working on this project but I’ve gotten the partridge done and a couple of the pears along with the tree. When I took these pictures, I hadn’t finished the tree.
Steps for padded stumpwork:
1. Outline the area for the padded object. The teacher wanted this to be done in thread. It could also be with some variety of erasable marking pen.
2. Next, for this object—a pear— it is thicker around the lower middle, so to give a more realistic end result, a small bit of padding is put lower down. The teacher described the location as where the seed of an avocado would be. This piece of felt is too small to be pinned down, so I just held it in place with a finger tip while I put in 4 stitches to hold it in place. The focus isn’t great on this, but you get the idea and you can see the outline stitching. Pretty basic stitching.
3. Add a second layer of padding. Remember you want the whole pear raised up, just a bit more so where the pear would naturally be thicker. In the picture below, the second layer of padding has been tacked down. You can also see the outline of another pear and part of the partridge.
4. Embroider around the pear with split stitch. I don’t have a picture of that, but you can see it in the picture of the last step below.
5. Embroider over the padding, but within the outline stitch. The embroidery here isn’t great, I was in too big a hurry in the classroom.
So that is how it’s done. It isn’t that hard if you can embroider, you can do stumpwork, at least this variety of padded stumpwork.
Here is where I’m at now.
You can see the second pear above the first one, is much smoother embroidery. I’ve started doing the ground flowers. I wasn’t too sure about the embroidery on the tree, it seemed too “rough” but I think it worked out well for tree bark. We were told to alternate stem stitch and outline stitch, and it did work.
So: What Are You Working On Now?