Interpretive Embroidery: Shapes Kit

This Interpretive embroidery kit is lovingly inspired by the Quilts of Gees Bend, Alabama. The women who made, and are still making, these extraordinary quilts have been a huge inspiration to me throughout my life. Although I rarely wear or work in such marvelous colors, the colorwork in these quilts is magical, as are the repetitive shapes. And the simple and honest use of materials is humbling. I encourage you to read more about them and see the many fine examples presented in this website: https://www.soulsgrowndeep.org/gees-bend-quiltmakers

I first became aware of these astonishing quilts as a young woman poring over arts and crafts magazines, soaking up inspiration. I was lucky to see several of these quilts in person more recently at a museum exhibition in San Francisco. I have thought for a long time about how to incorporate this inspiration into my own work. Although I am not a quilt maker myself, I find the graphic quality of the repetitive shapes and colors to be as stimulating as a painting by Picasso or Matisse.

When I decided to do an interpretive embroidery kit based on shapes, it was obvious to me that I needed to let these quilts guide me. I have used the shape motifs from several of my favorite quilts for this kit. Each shape is hand drawn by me to mimic the actual organic shapes in the quilts. I intentionally decided to use a neutral palette instead of the original vibrant colors…I wanted the user to be able to concentrate on the act of filling the shapes with stitches without color distraction. And since color is so subjective, I didn’t want to impose my color sense on to the user.

There are many ways to fill a shape, so I hope you stretch your imagination and have fun. What I have presented in my own embroidered version is a collection of my favorite stitches used as fills. I have videos for most of these stitches on our website, (https://www.judithandlily.com/embroidery-stitches) and videos for the others are easily found through an internet search.

Have fun, and I hope this kit inspires you to do more with your embroidery as you progress. Just in case you get really inspired, you can purchase separate gridded fabric from our embroidery section of the website and work on more shapes and textures.

The kit includes 10 skeins of hand-dyed Weeks embroidery floss, silkscreened cotton fabric, #7 embroidery needle, and detailed photographs of each embroidered square. Dimensions of the printed fabric is approximately 12” x 12”.

You will need a 6 inch embroidery hoop which are available here.