I began the month­ly stu­dio check-in as a way to hold myself account­able for the projects I take on. (Accord­ing to Gretchen Rubin’s The Four Ten­den­cies, I’m some­one that needs out­side account­abil­i­ty to get any­thing done!) That being said, March was not a pro­duc­tive month in my stu­dio prac­tice. The big rea­son? I moved! Across the coun­try! My hus­band got a job in Seat­tle, so over the course of four weeks, we packed up our life in Min­neapo­lis and found an apart­ment in the Pacif­ic North­west. Now that we’re here, things are slow­ly begin­ning to resem­ble a new normal.

I still man­aged to fin­ish a small embroi­dery and made progress on my 1 Year of Stitch­es project. To see what I’m doing in near-real time, fol­low me on my embroi­dery-only Insta­gram account, @brwnpaperbag_stitch.

1 Year of Stitches

March 5

I start­ed March with leaves—very typ­i­cal for this project—and then zagged to a poo­dle. Inspired by a ceram­ic spaghet­ti poo­dle stat­ue that I own, I drew the pro­file of one of these crea­tures. I start­ed by sketch­ing onto the fab­ric itself, which is almost always a mis­take; rarely do I ever like a draw­ing on the first go. But, hav­ing learned some strate­gies from last mon­th’s Stafford­shire dog, I did­n’t fret and calm­ly res­ketched the pup.

After set­tling on a draw­ing I liked, I made a time-con­sum­ing deci­sion. Because of the high­ly tex­tured nature of these ceram­ic pieces, I decid­ed to recre­ate their “fur” using the bul­lion stitch. The bul­lion stitch takes some time to mas­ter, but once you do, it becomes eas­i­er and eas­i­er to recre­ate. But, it’s time-con­sum­ing and tends to hurt my fin­gers after long peri­ods of time—hence why I’m still work­ing on the hair! My goal for April is to fin­ish the poo­dle and get back to cats.

March 17

March 21

March 27

March 28

Cat and Plant Embroideries

I fin­ished one four-inch embroi­dery in March. Sim­i­lar to my kit­ty sur­round­ed by calathea leaves, the recent­ly com­plet­ed embroi­dery fea­tures a tab­by sur­round­ed by plants native to the PNW. (It’s a com­mem­o­ra­tion of my move!) There’s a big leaf maple sur­round­ed by wild gin­ger and flanked on the ends north­ern lady fern. It’s now avail­able in my Etsy shop.

Embroideries in Progress

Now that I’ve set­tled into my new stu­dio space, I’ve been able to sketch four (!!) new embroi­deries. Two are on cham­bray shirts which will be list­ed on Etsy as soon as they’re done, and the oth­er two are fur­ther explo­rations of cat por­traits and vin­tage dog stat­ues. I’m excit­ed about all of them. I’d love for you to see my progress over the course of April on Insta­gram.

The cham­bray shirt on the right will have either end of the col­lars flanked by cats.