Over the summer, I met Gina of Global Backyard Industries, by chance at the Alki Art Fair. She immediately loved my unique terrarium embroideries and passed along her contact information to hopefully collaborate on a design.
During the next month Gina and I traded emails. We worked together to create an embroidery design that would keep the theme of my terrarium embroideries and also provide those stitching the kit an opportunity to learn new embroidery stitches, similar to an embroidery sampler. After sketching up a couple designs, we landed on one that featured a variety of playful plants. Gina found some beautiful marbled fabric on Spoonflower, and sent me a sample to stitch our chosen design.
This collaborative design process challenged me to work with a limited color pallet. To keep stitch kit costs reasonable, we wanted to use 6-8 colors. For my usual terrarium designs, I use anywhere from 10-20 different colors, because they're one-of-a-kind pieces. After choosing a design and receiving the Spoonflower fabric, I picked colors that would pair well together and also provide variety without looking plain.
While I have designed a few stitch kits of my own, none of them have the variety of stitch techniques available in this collaborative kit. As I embroidered each stitch of this terrarium, I thought about how I would describe to a new embroiderer how to do what I was doing. It was an interesting challenge, because I had to really pay attention to what I was doing as I stitched and be intentional with my descriptive explanations.
The Cactus Embroidery Kit comes with everything you need to create your own original wall art. Each kit includes: marbled background fabric, a 6" embroidery hoop, a #5 embroidery needle, a pre-printed pattern (it adheres to your marble fabric and you stitch right through it; once you're finished you dissolve it in water, 7 full skeins of DMC embroidery floss, black felt, a saw-tooth hook, and a downloadable link to a 6-page instructional PDF that comes with a color photo of the front and back of the finished work for reference, a floss chart, and detailed stitch and finishing instructions.
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Global Backyard Industries is a husband and wife team based in Seattle, Washington. They are makers themselves, and are passionate about offering products that bring hands-on creativity and fun to others.
I love collaborating on projects! If you’re looking to collaborate on a project or want a custom embroidery created, email me at mcreativej@gmail.com.