Embroidered Bread

The next couple of artists that I found are Judith Klausner and and Terézia Krnáčová. Both of them have created art by embroidering onto bread. 

Klausner has created a variety of food based creations, but the most relevant to me was her embroidered toast. Each slice of toast in this series got an embroidered "topping", including an embroidered egg, embroidered butter, and even some embroidered mould.

Krnáčová's work spans a variety of different ideas, but it was her "Everyday Bread" project that caught my attention. For this project, she embroidered onto 6 different slices of bread, and left the 7th untouched to represent the Sabbath. These designs are beautiful, with an intricate, lacy appearant.

Though I haven't picked textiles as an option, I was really inspired by these artists and wanted to create pastiches for each of them. 

I struggled to pick something for my Klausner inspired toast, as she had picked some of the more obvious choices. I ended up settling on baked beans. Instead of embroidering the sauce, I chose to use acrylic paint. This helped the beans pop a little better since were just a bit more 3d. The paint also seeped into the bread a little, which helped make it just a little bit more realistic, in my opinion.
The design isn't as complicated as Klausner's work is, but I'm still incredibly pleased with the result. I'm not very good at embroidery to begin with, and working on toast was really difficult. The bread gradually became softer as I worked, and it became increasingly harder to not tear the bread. 

When it came to the Krnáčová pastiches, I'll admit that I cheated a little. Since I struggled with working on toast, I knew it'd be much more difficult to embroider on standard bread. To get around that, I chose to crochet a little lacy coaster, and a granny square, and stitch them into the bread instead. Even doing this "shortcut", it was really difficult to assemble. I had to try to find a balance between getting the right tension to hold it in the place I wanted, and not pulling hard enough to rip the bread.
I'm pleased with the results from doing this, but I do think it has a different charm to Krnáčová's. Mine looks a lot less intricate than hers since it's using a tighter design with a thicker "thread". I didn't have any white wool to hand at the time either, and I do think that using white instead could've helped soften the design, and make a closer pastiche. Similarly, the overall "shape" of the bread is really different between our work.