Suzanne McNeill shared her amazing trip to India in photos and art in the July/August 2017 issue of Cloth Paper Scissors. In Drawn to India, Suzanne talks about the different techniques and tools she discovered and used during her travels. She also shares how she prepared the pages for her trip, and assembled the book when she arrived back home. There were so many wonderful photos and journal pages, we couldn’t fit them all in the article! We are thrilled to share more of them with you here.
Suzanne loves to do free-form embroidery—the kind where there are no rules. The covers of her India travel journal began with wonderful sari fabrics she found in her travels. The swatches already had some embroidery, beads, and sequins, but she was inspired to stitch around and between those embellishments. To begin, she added embroidery stitches along the seams with #5 perle cotton thread.
Next, Suzanne added shisha mirrors, which she glued to the fabric with a small dab of Amazing Goop® adhesive, and allowed to dry overnight. Gluing the mirrors kept them in place as she stitched. She added a stitched border around each of the mirrors (See below).
Finally, she added decorative embroidery stitches and #8 beads, adding a special shine and texture to the finished cover.
See below for a sampling of the stitches Suzanne used on this colorful journal cover.
