Lime Time
A lot of stitching went into this little half-lime. It sits a few millimeters above the background. That’s as flat as I could get it, and still have enough stitching for the look I wanted. The “juice” is thanks to free motion machine embroidery with lots of Sulky Sliver clear thread.
First I stretched silk in a 5-inch hoop and painted a lime-green color background. I used gutta to keep the color to the area of the lime. Then I chose thread colors for pith, and machine-embroidered the middle part and the dividers between segments. Here’s a poorly focused photo:
Once the segments were outlined, I machine-embroidered various shades of green and yellow, aiming for long loop shapes. With the green background, you don’t need full thread coverage. When these green areas were finished I went over them with long machine stitches in the Sulky thread, leaving the central pith “dry.”
Then I changed threads to my pith colors again and sewed a big circle of that around the whole thing. I also sewed some stitches in green, to reflect the way the pith becomes greener near the skin. I believe it was at this point my always supportive husband called me a “pith artist.”
Then I cut the lime right out of the silk. The stitching was so dense it held together well. The skin is a length of 3-mm wide ribbon, painted green. It’s glued on around the edge, then tucked underneath and glued into place there as well. I wanted to keep the illusion of the skin disappearing from view, just like the real thing.
The plate is silk painted a shade of light blue. I have a trick for doing this but forgot to take photos. What can I say, I get excited. Basically when I stretch my silk in my particular hoops (Morgan no-slip) and pour on the paint and let it run right out to the edges, and let it dry, when I take it out of the hoop I get a nice plate effect without trying. The white plate “edge” is the part of the silk that disappeared inside the hoop. I don’t understand why it doesn’t turn blue, but it doesn’t, and that’s great.
The shadow is painted. And the checkered tablecloth is checkered tablecloth material – I used up all my fake on the lime.
More fruit to come in the new year!