13 Nov Spotlight: Embroidery Art With Painterly Detail

Inspired by “nature, magic, and all things fantastical,” British textile artist Emillie Ferris stitches embroidery designs featuring butterflies, moths, bees, and flowers. She first began embroidering in 2013 and has since developed a style that she calls “needle painting.” Each colorful design is rendered using long and short stitches, similar to paint strokes. The self-taught artist explains, “It is essentially like painting on a canvas, but rather than using paint, you are using thread.”

Ferris’s embroidery designs are often based on vintage entomology illustrations, which she then reimagines in thread. “I love to try and emulate a sense of romanticism in my embroideries,” she says. “I like to study numerous references of the object I want to embroider. For example, I must have saved hundreds of reference photos and watched many videos of the blue morpho butterfly, before digitally painting the butterfly in Photoshop, then transferring the pattern to fabric and bringing the butterfly to life with so many shades of blue thread. I couldn’t count them.”

From vibrant butterflies and fuzzy buzzy bees to magical mushrooms and fabulous flowers, Ferris captures her subjects in incredible detail. Each hand-stitched piece is truly a labor of love, but Ferris doesn’t keep her artistic talents all to herself. She sells her embroidery patterns on Etsy, so you can replicate her designs at home. Her butterflies, moths, bees, and flowers are rendered using countless long and short stitches, similar to painterly brushstrokes. The colorful results are so detailed, it’s hard to believe they’re all stitched by hand.

British textile artist Emillie Ferris stitches embroidery designs inspired by “nature, magic, and all things fantastical.”

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