Stitched Tom Servo

While I was making the otter card for my other half my brain did its usual thing of coming up with an idea that involved a lot of work that I didn’t really have time to do. Apparently what I really needed to be doing was creating a threadwork version of the layered Tom Servo card I made for him last year. Luckily the sane part of my brain realised that I was unlikely to be able to achieve that in the three days I had left before his birthday and insisted that I finish the otter card first.

But the idea stuck and I set out about taking the outlines in the layered file and turning them into lines with evenly spaced dots. This was quite fiddly in places, ensuring that none of the holes ended up too close to each other which would risk tearing the card when I came to sew it. Eventually I had a design that I thought could work, so I printed it out and pricked it onto some card. I’d stitched the otter on watercolour paper, which felt much sturdier to work on and I wouldn’t do something this size on this lighter weight card again.

Now I just had to figure out how to stitch it. I started with the simplest, most obvious bit and outlined the circle in stem stitch. From then on it was really a case of making it up as I went along, taking inspiration from the way parts of the otter card were constructed. For some of the areas I even went back to the computer and tested out patterns of lines on the digital design before committing thread to card.

Once it was done — remarkably, I finished it the day before his birthday — I just had to find a simple frame and wrap it up as an extra present.