Mirror Work - 1, Easy mirror work for beginners

 Hi all

Hope all are doing well and great.  Till now I have posted tutorial for doing the basic embroidery stitches.  Today I am happy to start a new series of doing mirror work.  Mirror work is also known as 'Shisha work'. When I was a beginner in embroidery and not aware of the contents in the internet and books I tried myself a method of doing mirror work on seeing a mirror work in my dress.  

Today I am giving the step by step tutorial of doing the method I did in the beginning.  It is a very easy one.  You can use mirrors or sequences for doing mirror work.  For this tutorial I am using 2 cm diameter sequence.  

First glue the mirror to the fabric with a dash of fabric glue.  Or you can make a small anchor stitch on both sides of the sequence and attach it to the fabric.  

 

  

In this picture you can see the anchoring stitches from both the holes in the sequence.  Now let us start doing the mirror work. 

First make a straight stitch from top to the bottom. The first stitch is made. 

Then make another stitch from left to right, in the bottom of the sequence. 

 

Now make another straight stitch from bottom to top, on the right side of sequence.

Now make another straight stitch from right to left, on top of the sequence. 

Half of the work is done.  This itself will hold the mirror in place.

Now we have to work the same procedure starting from the centre of any two lines. 

 

Make a straight stitch from left to bottom as shown in the above figure(left).

Make another straight stitch from the left of the previous stitch to the right as shown above(right)

 

Make the next straight stitch from right to the top. This stitch should start from a little below the previous stitch.

Now make the last stitch from the top to the left.  This stitch should start from a little right to the previous stitch. 

The simple and easy mirror work with straight stitches is complete.  

Now you can add a more beauty by stitching a round of chain stitch around the mirror.  Here I have added a circle of round golden beads around the mirror.   And the mirror work look like this now.

In this work the mirror is seen and if we add two straight stitches in each stitches it will form a filled edge. You can do that by doing the following steps.

Start with the first four straight stitches.

Do one more straight stitches to the left of the first stitch, bottom of the second stitch, right of the third stitch, and top of the fourth stitch. 

 

Now make the next set of four straight stitches starting from the centre of the previous stitches.  Now add another straight stitches outside the stitches.  Now you can see the mirror is somewhat framed with straight stitches.  If we want to frame it completely we can use more strands of thread.  

I have embellished this work with a stone chain as shown. Glued a piece of stone chain around the mirror.

There are so many methods of doing mirror work with different stitches.  In my coming posts I will come up with one by one.  At the end we can create a sampler of mirror works. 

Do watch my space and have a nice day.

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