Artist Britt Hutchinson, better known as Tiny Cup Needleworks (@tinycup_), has only been doing hand embroidery for about three years, but she’s already amassed nearly 76,000 Instagram followers with her charmingly teeny tiny needlework.
She often photographs her work alongside a quarter to highlight its minuscule scale. “There’s something incredibly satisfying about meeting the challenge of executing a detailed piece inside of a small space, she says.
Despite its small size, her work seems to leap off the cloth at you. It’s delicate and unassuming at first, but the longer you look, the more intentional detail you can see in the stylistic variety of her stitches and knots.Techniques like bullion knots and French knots add texture and three-dimensional shape to her images. In fact, her gravitation towards skeletons was at least partially inspired by the resemblance that a line of French knot stitches has to a spine. “It was in those shapes that I started to piece together images, sort of like a puzzle,” she explains. “Eventually my process became an amalgamation of manipulating traditional stitches and puzzle piecing all of those shapes into a composition.”
While flowers, candles, books, and moons make regular appearances in her romantic, mysterious motifs, her pieces primarily feature skulls and skeletons. “My work is based on human emotion, and all people are just bones at the core of them,” says Hutchinson. “Anyone has the opportunity to project their own emotions into my imagery, and possibly find their own catharsis in seeing what they feel projected back at them. It’s like when you hear a song that gets you, and you feel less alone. I find a great deal of comfort and solidarity in those connections.”
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