It's a miracle. Textile artist Claire Moynihan has created insects I would touch willingly. She calls her technique "a ‘freestyle’ form of 3D embroidery which can loosely be described as stumpwork." I call it, really cute bugs on balls.

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The Museum of Childhood recently published a picture of this hundreds of year old unfinished embroidery sampler that's very unusual. Embroidery at the time was seen as a good pastime for a young lady, not just because it taught skills like sewing and mending but because it required "patience and concentration, and it kept women at home, focussed on a virtuous domesticity." Samplers usually depicted domestic, lady-appropriate scenes, so not as to upset the delicate sensibilities of any passersby. This sampler, as you might have noticed, is instead a very scientifically minded model of the Solar System, roughly as it was known at the time, and thinks that this may have been the work of a science minded young woman itching for a way to interact with a field denied to her. For example, they note that the sampler is decades out of date with the planets as they were known in 1811. "That might explain why the sampler wasn’t finished. Who, in 1811, would want to spend weeks or months working on a picture of the Solar System that didn’t include the newest, most exciting planets?" Certainly not a nerd. We're kind of sticklers for accuracy, you know. You can read the whole post, which goes on to talk about the science of the time, women of the time, and women in science of the time.

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Pop culture seamstress and crafter Chelsea Bloxsom isn't currently selling any of her beautifully felted and embroidered creations, just her plush ones. So we'll have to admire her hoops from our own computer screens.

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Can you recognize this just from looking at it? If you can, high five, because I got it too. It's an embroidery design inspired by NASA photographs of Jupiter's Great Red Spot, by Pardalote on Tumblr. They've got a lot of their beautiful work up on their blog but this, and another STEM oriented one caught our attention. It's a beautiful embroidered Voronoi diagram!

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I love scarves. I love geekery. I really love, therefore, geek-themed scarves, but unfortunately there aren't too many out there available for purchase (barring, of course, the obvious exception). That's why these geek scarves, made by Veronica Bailey (StoriedThreads on Etsy) make my cold weather-loving, sci-fi/fantasy-obsessed heart go pitter-patter. She also makes sew-on patches, and while I personally have never been really into those (I buy them but then never get around to putting them on anything), some of them are too cool not to share.

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Zaira Pulido is a Colombian artist who is into embroidery. That's not all though. No, that would be far too simple; she's into embroidery and she uses human hair. Of course, using something as personal as hair means that the embroidered portraits have a certain amount of uniqueness and personality to them. As such, one of the things she's taken to doing is creating portraits of her friends, using their own hair.

Now, I'm not too big into hair, but I will admit that these are sort of cool. A close up look at any of these portraits gets a little more unsettling, but it's just hair and it was obtained with consent, I can only assume and hope. I certainly wouldn't want to work with massive amounts of hair like that, but to each their own.

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