A garden of ribbons

SS17 was the season of embroidery. High street labels enthusiastically embraced the catwalk trend and in shop windows large, colourful thread designs appeared splattered over the most unexpected items: jackets, jeans, belts, you name it.

Plain heels are just so (last) last season

Although I'm far from a fashionista, I like to keep half an eye on current trends, looking for an excuse to turn a creative hand loose on my wardrobe. The idea of embroidery, however, felt a bit too painstaking, conjuring up images of slender heroines in darkened rooms bent uncomfortably over endless tiny sampler stitches as they wait for a valiant hero to come and introduce them to the outside world.

Could there be another way, Sophie?

I didn't want to give in that easily, though. I figured that the bigger the stitches, the quicker you can cover ground, which made embroidering with ribbons, instead of fine thread, a much more attractive option. On a whim one afternoon, I grabbed an embroidery hoop (because for some reason I own one), a chunk of fabric that used to be part of some trousers (because I hate landfill), and threaded the biggest needle I could find with a length of ribbon.

By that point, I had a burgeoning collection of ribbon embroidery designs saved on Pinterest, which were easy to copy. A reasonably short amount of time yielded encouraging results:

Cute hey?

A couple of shopping trips yielded a shapeless, mustard-yellow jumper (not entirely sure what I was thinking with that one) and 40 metres of ribbon in a gratifying mismatch of colours, widths, and textures.

My camera doesn't begin to do it justice

Given that...

1. Most of my projects are never finished at all
2. It turns out that embroidery with ribbons involves a lot of sewing ribbons in place so they don't come out as soon as you wash it
3. It also turns out that when you're threading a wide ribbon through itself, a single stitch can take a couple of minutes

...I'm actually quite proud that it only took me a year to finish my embroidered top.

Here's a video for you, which somehow makes it look like I did nothing at all: