How She Creates: Ep 014 - Embroidery with Jennifer Bilton, and Karen Gaunt
Embroidery is not only for grannies and we're excited to introduce two artists who are proving this to you today. Jennifer Bilton and Karen Gaunt make absolute magic with mixed media and are able to create works of art with materials. We're kind of in awe of them. Today we chat about their creative stories and what led them to creating with embroidery, how to not totally suck at it, managing time to create, and their favourite supplies for this medium. We also talk about perfectionism and imposter syndrome, and how exploring abstract and mixed media embroidery can help combat that in a very perfectionistic art form. Your paint is your thread in this medium and in this episode we weave and paint some real artsy magic.
Episode Takeaways and Artist Actions
- Karen and Jennifer's creative stories
- The artists' favourite definition for embroidery
- Magical gold thread and the cheat for getting the look without struggling
- Water soluble fabric
- How French knots are the devil's work
- About abstract fibre art
- Artist action: splice some words out of an old book and stitch it onto your hooped fabric
- The difference between fabric and paper
- Watercolour on fabric
- Stitching on paper
- Seeing thread as paint
- Seeing thread as ink
- Artist action: see thread as a different kind of pen to make it less intimidating
- Going from sucking in the beginning to being comfortable in this art
- Artist action: practise!
- Artist action: try out a back stitch
- Artist action: try out a kit or pattern to learn
- Learn from looking at other people's work
- Karen using "a wee while" in a sentence :)
- Karen's process for her eyelet wheels
- Taking inspiration and making it your own
- Artist action: do the class and copy it exactly
- Being a collector of words
- Playing
- The pressure of putting your piece out on Instagram
- Perfectionism and things that hold you back
- Abstract art to cure your perfectionism
- Artist action: share art that you don't like. Release it to the world. Someone will love it.
Resources and Tools
Guests
Jennifer Bilton
Jennifer is hand embroidery and mixed media artist. She studied creative writing and editing in college, but realised she is much happier in a studio than in an office. She is madly in love with art journaling, letterpress, notebooks, getting messy, and her two rescue dogs.
Karen Gaunt
Karen is a Dublin based mixed media artist with a passion for color and experimentation. Encouraging other artists to try new techniques and not to be afraid of simply creating for the sake of it 
The Knitting & Stitching Show
