Embroidered Magnolia Leaves

Alright, here goes my attempt at a blog. I am not the most internet or computer savvy person. As I stated in my "about me" I prefer hand work. I love to use my hands, I feel that you get a better feel for what you're doing and working with and you have more control...anyhow, so about this blog:

My name is Heather April Riniker and I am a fibers student at the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD). This is my final year here and I am trying to find ways to get my work out there a little more and possibly get noticed a bit more. As I continue forward, I will hopefully get a better hang of this blog thing and will be able to figure out a good format and yada ya...

The main purpose of this blog is to post the progression and help myself better develop the two current projects that I will be working on to help build my portfolio. Now, school is pretty much half of my life right now, of course, but the other side of me is that I am a runner. I run for SCAD and I am an endurance/distance runner. Because of this, I am sure that I will probably post things that have to do with running or biking or really anything outdoors. But enough of that. Here are my current projects:

1. EMBROIDERING A MAGNOLIA LEAF

This whole process began with randomly pairing up 8 sets of 4 words. One of the sets of words were:

-maps

-internet

-embroidery

-photograph

My interpretation of those would be to look up MAPS on the INTERNET, EMBROIDER the MAPS and then PHOTOGRAPH the outcome. and I did...mostly. I did look up maps on the internet, but I just took a map I had laying around and embroidered that instead.

I loved it.

After I presented the embroidered map to my class I decided that out of the 5 sets of random paired words, I really really enjoyed embroidering the map. Since I was in class and didn't have another map, I began embroidering a piece of paper. after about 10 min, the image (nothing really, just a random running stitch) looked to me kind of like a leaf. 

That's when I was like

IDEA!

I then ran outside and picked up a magnolia leaf and brought it back in, and began embroidering the veins of the leaf. I knew that right away that out of all the leaves I could have chosen that this one would be the right one. A magnolia leaf is a wax leaf, which to me means that it is think and durable and even when it dries up it doesn't crumble like an oak or maple leaf. this was the result of that day in class:

I posted the picture up on my facebook and got upwards of 25 'likes' which for me is a lot. Doing that kind of opened my eyes to the fact that this is kind of neat. I continued with it and finished the leaf. In the process I got to see the leaf dry up as I was still embroidering and take a shape all on it's own, which added to the beauty of the process, in my opinion. This was my first leaf and where it all began:

That is the story of how I began embroidering leaves.

After about 4 or 5 I became lost and was thinking "this is cool and all, but what is it really to become and do? What can I do with this and how can it benefit my portfolio?" So I left embroidering them for a while...but after getting a crazy amount of positive unasked for feedback all I could think was "Well......everyone seems to think they are crazy awesome, I guess they have potential. I shall go forward!" I would say that I have probably embroidered close to 20 leaves so far and I am still working on them. I would like to thank everyone who encouraged me to keep with it and for your positive feedback.

THE WORLD IS MY LIMIT AND THERE ARE ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES.

Heather April