The Art of Embroidered Butterflies

With gorgeous photos, a renowned textile artist guides you through the details of her creative process—and twelve amazing projects. The embroidery of Jane E. Hall is breathtaking, and in this book she combines her love of butterflies with her outstanding talent as a textile artist to produce three-dimensional renditions of exquisitely worked butterflies almost indistinguishable from the real thing. Using the finest of silk threads and needles, Jane lovingly creates her butterflies’ wings using the tiniest of stitches worked on to silk. They are then carefully cut away and the edges strengthened with hair-fine wire before being attached to the bodies, crafted from air-drying modelling medium and brushed with whisper-thin threads to resemble hairs. The butterflies are then placed within a setting of silk leaves and flowers, all made with the same painstaking attention to detail and expert skill as the butterflies themselves. This book provides a fascinating introduction to butterflies in nature, reflecting Jane’s love and admiration for these exquisite creatures, and goes on to describe the materials and methods Jane uses to produce her incredible creations. Twelve projects, each based on a different butterfly including the Painted Lady, Small Tortoiseshell, and Brimstone, present the finished piece along with the materials Jane used, and the photographs, swatches, drawings, and paintings that inspired it.