Embroidery artist Paulina Bartnik admits that she’s lucky that her hobby is also her current job. Her bird embroidered brooches (tagged aptly as “embirdery”) have taken the internet by storm, amassing over 40k followers on Instagram alone.
Talking about her background with the Paperfolk blog, she said that coming from an artistic family meant that creativity has always been a part of her life. “As a child I used to like to paint, draw and deal with all kinds of handicrafts,” she recalled. “I finished art school but I learned a lot of things by myself, including embroidery. I discovered embroidery as a teenager when I found a book about folk embroidery. I really liked it so I decided to try it myself. It came naturally to me because I had a background in various other fields of art.”
“Embroidery is very time consuming so I had to postpone it for a while and got back to it after a few years,” she admits. “I started to play around with felt and I discovered how good it looks when it’s combined with embroidery. Soft painterly effects can be achieved by using the felting technique and look perfect in combination with an acute line of threads.”
The finished product is more of a needle painting than a work of embroidery. “Mostly my work is based on images which fall into my hands and usually I don’t make any sketches,” says Bartnik. “I have plenty ideas in my head (sometimes too much) which isn’t always good because I forget to realize lots of them.”
Based in Poland, Bartnik loves nature, travel, and art, and says that nature itself provides the greatest source of inspiration for her as it contains all sorts of colors, shapes, and textures.
Take a look at some of her work below.
