The Butterfly Pinpad Finished

At long last I have finished the embroidery on the Butterfly Pinpad. The embroidery was simple enough – chain stitch, French knots, and satin stitch, worked either with a fine metal thread or pale green silk thread but the fine stitches gave me aching arms during the tennis elbow episode, so everything took longer than I would expect. Then of course I had to get started on finishing it. The reason it took me so long to wind myself up to it was – as some of you may have guessed – that glue was involved!

In fact, on this occasion, I cheated – if you can call it cheating when an embroideress uses her needle and thread! I chose to lace the butterfly itself, and the silk backing, onto their card supports, rather than attaching them with glue.

I found the ruched edging almost impossible to keep straight and even – perhaps I simply didn’t make the gathering threads quite even enough. Even squiffy, though, it looks quite luxuriant!

The bows were quite hair-raising to do, as well – tiny, made of very fine silk ribbon, and a little inclined to flop. I tied my fingers in knots, several times, as I made and attached the four of them!

Now that it’s finished, I’m pretty pleased with it, all the same, although I can’t imagine I’ll ever be able to bring myself to stick pins in it…

Another Needlework Nibble – the Butterfly Pinpad

There is yet another Needlework Nibble available from Thistle Threads! This involves a particularly fine gold thread, and some stranded silk.

This one is a tiny butterfly, outlined in gold, highlighted in pale green silk, and then finished as a pinpad. I have discovered in the past two years that I really enjoy working these little pieces, and they are a great way to find out about different threads, stitches or techniques without being entirely overwhelmed by the scale of the project.

I’m suffering from tennis elbow at the moment (owing to the housework, not the embroidery!), so I am particularly interested in smaller projects that allow me to make visible progress in short spans of time. I thought that this might be one of them, but actually the stitches are so hair-raisingly small that I’m no longer sure that is the case.

The stitches are only a couple of millimetres long, and with my arm in its present state, what you see here is the result of two half-hour sessions!