Holiday Traycloth – second installment

Now this is very “Swallows and Amazons“, isn’t it!

There’s a woven spiders web wheel for the top of the picnic basket, the little girl’s red hair is worked in coral stitch and her older sister’s is satin stitch. It’s barely visible in the photo, but the satin stitch is angled this way and that to create something that looks a little like a Marcel wave – a very grown up style on a relatively young girl!

As in the first installment, the cuffs and flounces are in blanket stitch. The spots are French knots, and the lilac dress is worked as a pattern of back stitches.

This motif, “Reading” shows particularly clearly how skilled the designer was in making the best possible use of simple shapes and simple line. Much of the design uses straight stitches – for the leaves, the bark, and the stems of the leaves.

The pattern on the skirt alternates back stitches with tiny satin stitch blocks, and the hair is stem stitch. The book and the shoes are satin stitch, the flowers are French Knots, and anything else is in back stitch.

It couldn’t be simpler to do, but doesn’t it look good!

This is the point where – after nobly containing my experimental impulses for quite some time! – I indulged in a few wanderings from the path laid down. The shorts are actually woven! It must have been tricky to get right, but it’s worked really well – they look slightly tweedy, but in any case the sort of heavy fabric that any sensible mother would clothe her child in for scrambling around rocks and beaches.

The little gold fish is worked in Vandyke stitch, which is tricky to keep even but creates a strong line down the side of the fish to contrast with the net in the background.

Holiday Traycloth – first installment

I worked this immediately after the First Voluntary Project, and my goodness, is there a difference between the two! I think I must have talked with Grandmama and looked at some of her embroidery, and it looks as though suddenly the whole idea “clicked”.

The motifs are from transfers from another of Grandmama’s Needlewoman Magazines (August 1934, if you are interested!), worked on an old piece of linen in stranded cottons. The design was suggested to be a cover for a photograph album, but since my family isn’t really photograph-conscious, I felt that such a thing would be superfluous, and finished it as a traycloth instead. We added the seagull to cover a hole in the linen, which was already quite old.

The range of stitches is very limited on this piece – I must have been following the instructions in the magazine – and the whole thing is surprisingly neatly worked. I love the little girl’s spotty dress (satin stitch spots!) and windswept stem stitch hair, and the starfish is wonderfully knobbly, with closely packed French knots.

Most of the outlining across the whole piece is in back stitch, and although I didn’t count it precisely, I suspect the weave of the linen made that much easier to do than it might have been.

The designs themselves are very reminiscent of the children’s books of the period – it’s even exactly the right sort of dog, slightly scruffy, but always ready to play!

These walkers have blanket stitch collars and cuffs, and stem stitch hair. His shorts are worked in Jacobean Couching and the spots on her skirt are French knots. The leaves on the bush in the background are detached chain, and the yellow flowers are blanket stitch wheels. Again, the hair is in stem stitch and the socks (like the little girl’s shoes) are in satin stitch.

You’ll notice that all of these stitches re-occur when I describe the other motifs, too. The designer has made absolutely first-class use of all the stitches.