Category: General Embroidery
Harrogate Haul..
The Knitting and Stitching Show in Harrogate is my main opportunity to stock up on thread, fabric, materials and oddities.
Yes, I know we all buy online these days, but so often I am looking for something slightly obscure, or I know what I want to achieve, but not how. The opportunity to look and feel before buying, and to talk to the specialist suppliers who are there, is absolutely invaluable.
Flat Silk for Necklace Embroidery
This time I was semi-organised, and as soon as I arrived, I went to Midori Matsushima’s stand with a shopping list of colours for the Faience Necklace designs, when I get to them. I’m hoping that now I have the silks I will have an incentive to pull my ideas into focus, because I feel that the Dreams of Amarna panels need more colour in them.
Felt and Thread
I also bought some wool felt and silk threads, some because I have plans for it, and some to have something frivolous to do. I still have a couple of those wooden pots to put pincushions in…
This slightly less dense felt – some from 20th Century Yarns and some from Oliver Twists – is much easier to stitch than the dense felt sold to crafters which is stocked everywhere. I also like the somewhat rougher texture.
Silk for Spinning
I went to a workshop introducing wet felting, which I am planning to use as the initial colour blocking for the “Vision of Placidus” panel, but what I actually bought was more silk to spin into thread for the second layer. I’ll have to wait until the sore elbow and shoulder have healed, but this is something I can do in preparation for the project while I’m still working on the Dreams of Amarna. I’m thinking about Placidus quite a lot in my odd moments!
A good reference book
Blanket Selvedge
Finally, I bought a book – only one, but it’s a cracker! – and a ball of wool selvedge, for purposes that will remain a mystery for now…
Playing with brooches again
Gauze Spiral
I was very taken with a length of gauze ribbon i found when I was rummaging for bits of teal fabric, and spent an idle moment or two running a gathering thread along one edge. I wasn’t at all sure where I would go from there, but as I pulled the gathering thread up the ribbon settled naturally into a tight spiral reminiscent of an Elizabethan ruff. Hmmm. Promising!
In the end, I covered another self-cover button with two layers of a rather gorgeous silk fabric which I originally bought for my mother to line a bookbox she made for a fine binding of “The Wind In The Willow”, and created a cross between a winner’s rosette and a new species of flower.
I think it will be fun to wear, but the real delight is the ruffle… It has “loft”, and a gentle glimmer, both from the gauze and from the silk button. More of a spring than an autumn piece, with that light spring green and and the gauzy ruffle, but I’ll look forward to the treat!
Satin and Tweed
Talking of unnatural flowers….
What I would really like to do is think of something else to do with the tweed fabric in the centre of this. It was cut off a pair of trousers which were too long for me, but it is a nice fabric and I want to create something fun with the scraps.
Thinking caps on, then…
Finished – Tiny – Flame Stitch Pincushion
Flame Stitch Finished
There are in fact several errors in the stitching here. However, since I kept losing them and finding them and losing them again, I decided to let them stand. If even I can’t keep them in sight, no-one else will find them…
I enjoyed using the silk thread for the stitching – but then I keep saying that, don’t I? Silk seems alive somehow, in a way that cotton, linen, and even wool, don’t.
Finished Flame Stitch Pincushion
What really surprised me was just how small the pincushion was when I finished it, using a spare fragment of silk fabric for the back. It was really quite astonishingly fiddly when it came to turning it inside out and especially when it came to the corners.
Still, here it is, done, and stuffed, and the final side closed up neatly..
Isn’t It Tiny!
And then I put it in the palm of my hand and finally realised just how small it really is…
Another one for that eventual Winter Decoration Corner, I think – in my chaotic workspace, a pincushion this size would sink without trace!
Making Brooches
Haul from L’uccello
Those who follow me on Instagram may recall that I posted a picture of goodies acquired from L’uccello, on Swanston St in Melbourne, when I was there over the summer. Since I went in with no particular end in view, I was completely bewildered by the range of possibilities I found, so I didn’t buy very much, but now I know where to find them, I will do my homework in advance!
Felt Flower
When I came home, vague and somewhat jetlagged, I sat and played with the felt and thread (a cotton from Sajou, a brand I’ve heard of, but never used before) that I’d bought, blanket stitching the felt shapes I had bought, and then attaching the felt ball using a whipped spider’s web stitch, pulled tight to flatten the ball slightly into the stacked shapes, and made a brooch. It works well, and there’s a lovely shine from the cotton.
Teal Circles
I enjoyed myself so much (somewhat to my surprise, as small, fiddly projects don’t go well with jetlag!), I started thinking of other brooches I might make. You may have noticed that I love Teal, in almost all shades, so my next effort was to cover different sizes of self-cover buttons with different teal fabrics. In fact the most difficult thing here was to devise a backing that might help to stack the buttons as I wished them to be stacked. In the end, I created a roll of felt, and sewed the buttons to that. The finished brooch looks a lot better than in the photo, which has killed off the colour.
Well, At Last!
Rejoice with me!
I have finished the polychrome tent stitch on Eve In The Garden Of Eden!
It has taken what felt like forever (although the post describing the start is less than a year old, as it happens), because firstly, I have to do counted work in short bursts or it drives me up the wall, secondly it is very fine and required a magnifier, and thirdly – there’s a lot of it!
In fact, to be strictly accurate, I haven’t quite finished, but that is because the skip tent backgrounds for the cartouches reach under the trees, and I want to decide how leafy I want to make them before I do miles of tent stitch that may all be covered. But I feel as though I’ve reached a milestone, so please don’t rain on my parade!
More Long Buried Projects
Made A Start
I’ve not really been able to settle to anything this summer, which has lead to a lot of reorganisation, rather than any real progress. Consequently, I keep on finding long-forgotten projects and thinking “Must finish that!”. Here’s another one…
This is in fact a legacy of the early stages of my original, pre-internet, usage of the word “VirtuoSew”, when I was producing counted cross stitch kits as “DevaStitch Designs”. The idea, developed by my husband The Australian, was to use whole stitches, fractional stitches, and back stitches to create a sort of dithered “newsprint” effect.
A Long Way To Go
The Stalking Tiger never got beyond early stages, but it’s an interesting technique, if not one for cross stitchers who hate fractional stitches!
I might wait until I’ve got on top of the Garden of Eden, which also involves a lot of counting, before I try to wrap this one up…
Finished Stitch Off Traycloth
StitchOff Traycloth
So here is the completed traycloth, laid on a convenient tray and assisted by the hand-me-down cutlery (from my grandparents) and the hand-me-down Willow Pattern (from my cousin). We were very entertained (and very pleased for them!), when going around a stately home last year, to find that Willow Pattern was the servant’s hall crockery, although I don’t know quite why.
Traycloth Elements
I didn’t attempt to stitch the two motifs identically. The original sketch of the patterns didn’t look identical, and to my mind that form of perfect repetition is overrated in any case. This shot also shows the machined “satin stitch” border, of three very narrow bands. I suspect they may be padded in some way because the bands are very heavily ridged.
StitchOff Motif
I chose to use very few colours – a yellow, two oranges, and two greens. The stitchery is simple, too, stem stitch and satin stitch, with bullion knots for the stamens. I don’t much like doing bullion knots (a holdover from early attempts) but sometimes they are simply and unarguably, the right stitch for the job.
They didn’t take long, and the completed traycloth does have a very cheering look to it!
Visit to Chawton House
The Stitch Off
You may recall that I’ve written several times about the Great Lady’s Magazine Stitch Off. A good many of us found our Twitter timelines more fun and more colourful for several months, while we played with the designs and watched each other play with them. Some of those pieces (including my pashmina) then went on display at Chawton House Library, as part of their exhibition “Emma At 200“.
And last week, I finally got to Chawton House to see the Exhibition!
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- Panel Stitched by Penny Gore
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- Tablecloth stitched by Elizabeth Emmens-Wilson
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- Panel stitched by Mary Martin
Chawton House itself is interesting, but instead of being simply a respectable country residence, it now houses a library which is a genuine scholar’s resource, as well as containing displays about women writers and even one about Jane Austen’s publisher (a man she described, in a letter to her sister Cassandra, as “a rogue, but a civil one“).
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- More glories….
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- Pot and Pot Plant by Corinne Young
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- Kissing Ball and Shoes
And a wonderful, oak-panelled room, full of Stitch Off delights. I was particularly pleased to find that everyone’s pieces looked better than when I saw them on Twitter, accompanied by apologetic indicators of Where I Went Wrong. There were exquisite renditions in period-appropriate techniques and materials, and there were completely different pieces using modern techniques and materials, some even machine stitched using computer controlled sewing machines, some finished pieces, and some simply presented, either laced over card or even still in the hoops they may have been worked in. They all looked wonderful – a real treat!
Me with my pashmina, photographed by Darren Bevin
And I found my pashmina, draped over a chair….
The photograph was taken by Darren Bevin, the librarian at Chawton House Library, and has already appeared on Twitter. We missed a trick, in fact – I should have picked it up and swept it around my shoulders, as I will when I get it back again!
Found in Tidying
Blackwork Pattern
Remember all those frames? And the teacloth? And “Co-operation is better than conflict“?
There’s been a bit more tidying up going on, and this appeared, ready prepared and kitted up. Presumably by the very same lady – or, given what embroiderers are like, possibly acquired from someone else who’d decided not to do it after all. I’ve found all sorts of half-completed needlework projects on Embroiderer’s Guild stalls!
The design was in a copy of “New Stitches” magazine, but heaven knows how old it is. At least eight years, because we’ve had it tucked away that long!
Blackwork As Inherited
There’s not much of it done, so one of us will have plenty to keep themselves occupied with.
In spite of Topsy, my mother is talking about taking it on. She’s much better at counted work than I am, so I’m likely to leave her to it, although I must admit it does look rather charming, and blackwork is a style I’ve yet to tackle!
Blackwork Detail
Look at all the different stitch patterns here! So intricate…
If ever either of us gets this finished, I’ll be sure to let you know…
A Lovely Teacloth
One Corner Of Teacloth
This teacloth was worked by my mother as a schoolgirl.
The design came from a transfer, and there was another girl in her class that was working the same one. With rather a difference. Her flowers were all lazy daisy stitch, and anything else was stem stitch, apart from the edges, and she got the whole thing finished in a term.
Needless to state, as her mother’s daughter, and with the spectre of Miss Hunter in the background, my mother wasn’t going to use a stitch with “lazy” in the name.
Central Ring
She did all the edges in blanket stitch – which with my recent experience with the Azorean Cutwork has me extremely impressed. It takes so long to make any noticeable progress with it!
The leaves are all in feather stitch, and they’re beautifully shaped, and the flowers are satin stitch – very neat satin stitch, which again is one of my least favourite stitches, and one I only do neatly in short bursts and with something else to do in between!
Detail Of Corner
Of course, my mother didn’t get her teacloth done in a single term – but her teacher was so impressed with what was finished that she took it home and handwashed and pressed the completed corner to put in in the end of term exhibition.
In spite of the fact that I very much doubt whether the teacher had contributed anything at all to my mother’s skill in the matter!