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I love to wind embroi­dery bob­bins with DMC floss. The act is so sim­ple and repet­i­tive that it has a med­i­ta­tive qual­i­ty. It also sig­ni­fies the “clean up” of a project. After I’m done stitch­ing, I take all the loose threads I accu­mu­lat­ed dur­ing a project and find their cor­re­spond­ing bob­bin in order to tidy up my thread stash. How satisfying!

I’m hap­py to report that I was able to per­form my clean up rit­u­al this week. I fin­ished the cus­tom pug patch and shipped it to its new home. Once I fin­ished the embroi­dery, I cut it from the fab­ric (a bit ter­ri­fy­ing, if I’m hon­est) and then mount­ed it on felt. From there, I applied a stick-on back—so new sewing required to adhere it to a jack­et or backpack.

I men­tioned in my week­ly newslet­ter that I’ve been try­ing to film more of myself stitch­ing after upgrad­ing some of my pho­tog­ra­phy equip­ment. This comes in the form of reels that I post on Insta­gram. Here I am embroi­der­ing an eye in anoth­er edi­tion “wow I wish I could stitch this fast.” (The video is sped up 1000%.)

 

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#WIP: Cat eye time! See how the left blue peep­er came togeth­er with some speedy stitch­ing. #embroi­dery #embroi­der­yart #stitch­ing #hand­stitch­ing #petem­broi­dery #cus­tom­pet­por­trait #petp

A post shared by Sara Barnes (@brwnpaperbag_stitch) on Oct 18, 2020 at 1:50pm PDT

And here is the same shirt far­ther along:

If you’re inter­est­ed in film­ing what you do, this goose­neck phone hold­er is great; it’s the eas­i­est and most con­ve­nient one I’ve used yet.