A few years ago, in a fit of needing retail therapy whilst I was unhappy in a former job, I went to the Crafty Ribbons site and bought a few of their cut price, end of range kits, some of which I've already featured on blog. This was the last remaining one and the design left me feeling that I could really understand why it had been discontinued. For one, the design isn't that exciting, but that's nothing compared to the poor choice of background colour - dark green and purple on black! How they sold any is beyond me, but I got one and tried to make some improvements. Naturally, the very first thing was to dump the black background. This is both an easy thing to do and made necessary by the fact that they always seemed to give you the very smallest scrap of fabric possible to work on - the sort of size you can't fit into a suitable hoop without troublesome mounting with other fabrics etc. So, that's easy to lose. I had another go at painting a background for it. The first time I tried, I did the greens in too 'yellow' a tone and so the rather blue-ish colours went poorly with it. This time I made sure the tones were all relatively blue themselves, even though they faded a lot more than I expected (again!) by the time they'd dried.
I also jigged around a tiny bit with the design, but I don't think I made any real improvements there, especially as I'm no expert in ribbon work and really only know one or two basic concepts. What do you think of the finished item anyway?
I like this sideways on view as the light has captured the sparkly elements of the organza ribbon nicely, which is a photographic treat as one normally doesn't get to see such detail.
I've already got the next small stumpwork piece prepared in the hoop for embroidery, so look out for that starting soon!
Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2013
