Incredibly realistic scenes from rural life have been painstakingly recreated by a British artist in her own living room – using just a needle and thread.
This patient artist is Jill Draper, 62. She creates embroidered tapestries, recreating scenes with astonishing accuracy from photographs. Each picture measuring around 15 by 30 inches contains hundreds of thousands of stitches done by hand and machine.
She picks from her thousands of colours of household cotton or Terylene and applies them with a sewing machine or darning hoop. She hand-sews special detail with pure silk. She sews for around six hours every day and relies on natural light to distinguish between the hundreds of similar shades.
A photograph [left] taken in Autumn 2009 of a heather path, and Jill Draper’s hyper-real tapestry of the scene.
A photograph of snow-covered trees taken in winter 2007 [left] ..and Jill’s tapestry of the snow-covered trees [right]
A photograph of a snowy Wenhaston, Suffolk in January 2010 [top]. Jill Draper’s realistic tapestry of the wintry scene [bottom]
I guess the top one is photograph and the bottom is Jill’s work… It is hard to tell.
