Flag Friday - Embroidery

Incorporating hand stitching into a prayer flag helps me to pray
and ponder over the person(s) I am creating the flag for.
Hand embroidery can be used to create text, as Sue Rideout did in her flag, or. . .

. . .to emphasize shapes, as Jamie Fingal did in this flag, or. . .

 . . .to create images, as Annika Lund and her embroidery students did in these lovely flags.

There are a plethora of stitches that can be used on prayer flags. Many more than just a straight stitch and french knot (even though those are both great stitches).  Rather than rewrite the book on embroidery tutorials here on the Prayer Flag Project, we are sharing some links to some top notch hand embroidery tutorials.

Mary Corbet's Needle 'n Stitch Video Tutorials - Over 70 easy to follow videos!

Sarah's Hand Embroidery Tutorials - Picture Dictionary with links to Tutorials

The Purl Bee Embroidery Basics - Tutorials of basic stitches

The Purl Bee, Two-Color Techniques

I hope they will inspire you to incorporate a new stitch or two into your prayer flags, and then fly your flags by sharing them on the blog.  If you know of a tutorial not listed, please feel free to leave a link in a comment.

Kindness Given

Anne Gailhbaud, from France, has shared many of her prayer flags with us and when her friend heard that Anne's husband was very ill she knew just the right thing to give to Anne:

Thank you Anne for sharing your friends beautiful prayers for you and your husband.  We wish you both many healing prayers and love.

Anne has photos of many beautiful flags on her Flickr Page: https://www.flickr.com/groups/1715420@N23/

For a Friend

Anja Kieboom from http://www.scrapitch.over-blog.com wrote to share with us how she made a prayer flag for a friend who suffers from cancer:


I wrote the words down in the normal way on a piece of fusible interfacing that i ironed back to front to get the mirror image on the back to do the free sewing correctly.

 Every stitch i made was a prayer for her. I hope she'll find a lot of courage to battle this treacherous disease.At the same time I hope that the prayers will be carried to those who also suffer and hope they will find the strength to cope with it.

I used a big, old nail I found somewhere for the hanging. Nails, as we sometimes see in old paintings, are supposed to be the symbol of great suffering.  I added ribbons to help the prayers to be swept along.

I created the black and white flower pattern by using a gelli plate to finish the back of the prayer flag.

Thank you so much for sharing this beautiful flag with us Anja!  Her blog is in French but the beautiful photos and artwork speak volumes in any language!

Flags in progress

i hadn't wanted to post my latest prayer flags so that others from around the world could also post a few of theirs in between.  but jane (one of the coordinators of this wonderful project) contacted me today to ask me to upload a few pictures of some of my other flags.  most are finished but a few are still in progress since i often switch mediums to break the routine a bit.

as you can see, i love the sacred heart motif and use it quite a bit in my fabric work.  both of these are still in the making: just need to mount the second one on a background fabric and add some wording.  the previous is still waiting for some black stitching for the detente of which i am out of at the moment.

hope you enjoy them and get some inspiration to make your own.

here is a more whismical prayer flag i created recently.  what was i thinking?  or was it that extra glass of wine at bedtime?

constanza berger from chile

http://www.poramoralarte-folklorista.blogspot.com/

hand stitched prayer flags

JenClair has joined The Prayer Flag project.

She's learning and practicing embroidery stitches with each one.