Tara McPherson Embroidery

I'm doing a little catch-up with the embroidery posts. Though I haven't been sharing, I've still been stitching.

I do most of my stitching while my husband reads to me, and now that the semester's well under way there's lots of evenings spent curled up reading and stitching. Especially since we're currently in book two of George R.R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire series. So lots of good books = lots of fun stitching.

This is one I finished back in July. Tara McPherson is one of my favorite visual artists (so much so that I hunted down all 10 issues of the Vertigo comic The Witching, and I have to say, sadly, that her covers were the best part). So, I was over the moon when Sublime Stitching brought her on as a guest artist to make a pattern pack.

I carefully selected my colors, deciding on a rich, jewel-toned palette for this piece. It was a simple enough design, so the colors would really make it pop. It does. I loved how it came out...until I went to wash the finished piece.

You can't tell in very well from the photo, but the colors actually ran. I'd used a batch of no-name floss and the pink and purple bled permanently into the snowy white fabric.

At first, I was crushed. This was my first encounter with floss-color-bleed ruining a piece, and of course it had to be on the Tara McPherson pattern I'd waited so long to stitch.

However, the more I look at it, the more I like the look. It seems appropriate for this figure to have a hazy purple halo and a heart who's color bleeds gently across her chest. Thematically, it works.

I'm still not sure if I'm going to hoop her and add her to the growing wall of stitch, but at least I've come to peace with her.

Moral of this story: check to see if you floss will bleed when you try a new brand. Especially a no-name brand.