Saturday, March 24, 2012

StitchPunk's Dark Fairytales

Remember my recent post about the use of red against a single color to illustrate and bring out the symbolism in a fairy tale? These beautiful embroidered designs from StitchPunk - Urban Threads, released in August 2011, do the same and with quite a few fairy tales.

I'm not really a crafty and needlework person, though I have been known to work on a tapestry or two, but beautiful and graphic art in any medium is fascinating to me. Embroidery, needlework and stitching of every kind is making a contemporary comeback with some creative and very non-traditional uses of the craft (like embroidery on metal HERE and stitched portraits HERE. You can see a whole lot more unusual stitching via these artist links at Mr. X Stitch HERE.)
Rapunzel
Jack & the Beanstalk
 So much you could infer from the blood red beans Jack threw away!
Snow White
Red Riding Hood
 I find it interesting to see where the red appears. Some, like the two above, are obvious while others, such as the Jack & the Beanstalk one, less so.
Sleeping Beauty
When I see red roses surrounding Sleeping Beauty in this context of a series of fairy tales, it makes me think of roses blooming out of the blood from her pricked finger. Vampire roses... hm. Yet another version of Sleeping Beauty.
Hansel & Gretel
 The red in the candy for Hansel and Gretel is a nice touch. Candy, in this case (as well as others) equals danger!
Cinderella
I like that they used the Aschenputtel version of Cinderella for the text, though they substituted rose blooms for bleeding. (Gives a whole new meaning to the pharse "love lies bleeding..". Even more if you change the punctuation: "Love. Lies. Bleeding.")
The Little Mermaid 
I'm not sure it was intentional, but the shape of the hair looks a lot like a ragged tongue here.
The Ugly Duckling
These designs are available for machine embroidery or as designs for hand embroidery and can be purchased HERE.

They have a few other designs such as a fairy tale castle (see below for design and an example of use), a book of fairy tales and a mushroom house in the same series and style.
I always wanted to do a contemporary Jack and the Beanstalk quilt & stitching wall hanging for my son (his name is Jack) but I quickly realized it would be an expensive and long term trial and error project. Projects like the ones shown here (and the non-traditional embroidery works I've linked to) make me want to dust off that project again.

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