Banana leaf papercut - now in my shop

So. Much. Papercutting. 

I'm really enjoying being so productive at the moment. I'm really happy with my latest piece, this banana leaf design:

It's also now available to buy in my shop if you want to bring some tropical decor into your home - and surely everyone wants that? 

I did a decent job of documenting stages of this piece: 

The intact outline, cut from one sheet
of black paper.

The first, lightest colour green is
added...

The reverse of the papercut which
is always a scrappy mess!

All the shades of green are added
and just need to decide on the
background.

This was pretty daunting to begin to assemble. Once I finished the outline and had to start deciphering what leaf should be what colour I had a headache for a while. But once I got stuck in it all came together. 

It was fun to take the plants I've done earlier another stage further and get involved in some detailed foliage. 

I think this would be awesome as a tessellation print...it's got me thinking about papercut patterns and some of the blackwork embroidery I did.

More on that soon.  What other plants could I do? Thoughts?

Trying out blackwork embroidery

So when I was doing my quilt there was a bit of embroidery involved, which I don't really have much experience in but I really enjoyed it and I've seen a lot of super inspiring work from embroidery artists on the internet.

I mean, how stunning is this work by Chloe Giordano. 

James picked up on this and he got me this book for Christmas. There are a load of great projects but one style that I really liked was the the blackwork, very stylised, geometric patterns usually done with black thread on white linen. 

 The book had a load of different patterns and stitches, and as I didn't have a project in mind but did want to get stuck in I decided to do a sampler-sort-of-thing to test the different patterns. 

I sewed a basic grid pattern onto some white aida fabric - 6 squares by 4 squares - and tried a different stitch in each square. 





I love this sampler - I sort of want to frame it! Blackwork is so tidy and orderly. I really want to figure out a way to use this in another project - I feel like maybe something architectural or abstract? I'm working on it.