White Threads

shadow work

In the next little while I have a few more projects – not for my book, unfortunately – that I need to get done. I have another piece of clothing that I need to embellish for Embellish magazine. Its a light and floaty fabric, which to me just says “shadow work please”. So I might just have to oblige!

Shadow work uses double back stitch (which looks like herringbone stitch) to create an outlined shape on the front, and a “shadow” filling of the same colour on the back that is seen through the fabric from the front. It needs to be worked on a transparent fabric for it to provide the full effect.

My sister is very very pregnant, and my niece or nephew could be born any day now. For her previous children I have made an embroidered lampshade. I recently realised that she’s expecting another one for this child too – a thought that hadn’t occurred to me before she mentioned it. I find that shadow work can work really well for lampshades, so I’ll probably do another one like that for her. If its a girl, then I’m looking forward to reusing my butterfly motifs all over it. If its a boy, I haven’t yet had any inspiration.

So there are a few more important projects coming up over the next little while that are almost guaranteed to add to my frustration levels – frustration that I am working on something other than the new book.

Here’s hoping the baby arrives soon though!

The Gift of Stitching ornament

Every year at about this time The Gift of Stitching Magazine puts out its annual Christmas ornament issue, and this year I’m in it! You can sort of see my ornament in the top left corner of the cover, right behind the “o”.

I started designing it when I was at the craft show that I exhibited at way back in June. At that time it was on natural coloured linen in white and green. Its gone through a few different design stages and changed a bit since then, now being in red, gold, and green on white linen. With The Gift of Stitching being a counted thread magazine, most of the ornaments are in cross stitch. Cross stitch isn’t really my thing though, but I learned lots of wonderful counted thread specialty stitches when I was writing my left-handed stitch dictionary, so I decided to use some of them and others.

My design features queen stitch (two different variations), cable stitch, and Hungarian stitch. I’ve already gone on and on about the Stitches and Spice single ply silk that I used for it in a previous post, so I won’t mention that again! And it does also use Gilt Sylke Twist for the green.

Queen stitch (used in the centre and the corners of my design) is a stitch that I was introduced to by Kirsten Edwards, the editor of The Gift of Stitching Magazine. We were visiting a craft show together a few years back and were talking about what was going to be in my new left-handed stitch dictionary, because she’s left-handed too! I had thought that the book was pretty much finished, but then she rattled off a list of counted thread specialty stitches many of which I’d never heard of! I realised at that point that the book was definitely not finished, and that I had better get going on some further research! This was my introduction to Queen stitch, and I have to say, its become a favourite. (Thanks Kirsten!)

If you’re interested in Queen stitch, you can find step by step instructions in both The Left-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion and The Right-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion.

I’m currently still downloading the issue of the magazine itself, but I’m really looking forward to seeing the other designs presented for our stitching pleasure this month. For those of you who subscribe, I hope that you enjoy the issue!

kelly fletcher

I’ve been busy doing my tax over the last few days, so I have nothing particularly interesting to tell you about what’s been happening here.

Therefore, today I’d like to point you to the blog (Materialistic) and website of Kelly Fletcher. Kelly is a UK based embroidery designer. She comes from a graphic design and writing background (sounds a bit like me!) and she’s very talented. She saw a niche in the market for good quality contemporary embroidery designs, so she set about filling that niche.

She has a range of embroidery patterns, of which my favourites are the Classy Grass cushion designs. Her latest thing is a downloadable magazine called “The Stitch and Thimble” which has five of her embroidery designs in it, as well as the regular sorts of things you’d expect to find in a magazine. Of course, as she is a graphic designer and writer, I imagine that it looks great and reads well, as well as featuring very pretty designs. Its going to be a quarterly publication, which just thinking about it makes me feel tired. I can’t imagine producing that many embroidery designs that regularly. I hope she enjoys a challenge!

I recommend you have a browse around her site and her blog, as I’m sure you’ll find it interesting and inspiring.

a literary weekend

On the weekend I read three books. It was wonderful!

The first one was “The Book Thief” by Markus Zuzak. Its a book I should have read a long time ago, and it was fabulous. My husband read it some time ago, and I don’t know why he didn’t give it to me to read then as well. Quite mystifying…

The second one was “Redeeming Love” by Francine Rivers. It is a novelised version of the biblical story of Hosea, which we studied last term in my biblestudy group (Hosea, that is, not the novel!). The book was loaned to me by one of the ladies in my biblestudy group – I think the rest of them had already all read it. I didn’t expect to like it – no, being more honest with myself, I didn’t want to like it. But I did. You see, there is something about the idea of Christian fiction (especially love stories) that just makes me want to throw up. Sorry to be so blunt, but there it is!

And the third book was “The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society” by Mary Ann Shaw and Annie Barrows. I loved it! Such a delightful story about interesting people living everyday lives. I didn’t want it to end.

Anyone else read any good books lately? I’d love to hear about them.

model stitchers

The other day I received an email from fellow needlework designer, Jennifer Forest, and author asking if I knew of any Australian or New Zealander model stitchers. Unfortunately I don’t.

I know that in the US, there are GhostStitchers, who seem very organised and highly professional. However, with us being here in Australia, sending stuff to the US adds time and cost to our postage.

Are you an Australian or New Zealand model stitcher? Or have you been wondering about doing such a thing? Is anyone looking for a hobby/business opportunity? Let me tell you, there IS a need for this sort of service here in Australia if your work is of very high standard. It is an opportunity just waiting for you to start a model stitching business here in Australia or New Zealand.

If this piques your interest, and you think you might be the right person to start, develop and run this sort of service, please do your research and get started! I’ll be looking forward to hearing from you!

left and right-handed reviews

From Jennyflowerblue, an excerpt from her review about The Right-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion:

These books are exceptionally clear in their directions and stitches are shown worked in all sorts of different ways and in sample to really give inspiration for their use. I am finding this book invaluable in my City and Guilds stitch samples. I have already got a few stitch dictionaries in my library, including the classics, but this is my first choice now as it is so bright and light and well indexed.

And a review of The Left-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion, by Nicole from Follow the White Bunny:

The Left-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion truly is my companion and for obvious reasons: all other books have diagrams for right handed stitchers so this book is my first choice to learn stitches from. It has very, very clear diagrams of the stitches too.

And from another left-handed review by Tamara Kowald on Lefty’s Left-Handed Products:

Clear instructions and pictures make it simple to get through the steps of even the hardest of stitches.

felt fun!

When I was little my sister and I loved borrowing Ondori books from our local library, which had felt toys and dolls to make. We made quite a few. You can tell the books made quite an impression on me, because how many other craft books do I remember the publisher of, from when I was a child?!

As a general rule I don’t go to Etsy as I figure I could waste far too much time there. However, this caught my eye the other day – a shop called Fairyfox which has lots of wonderful patterns so that you can make your own felt food and felt toys.

In the food line, there are [the ubiquitous!] cupcakes, petit fours, sushi, cappuccinos (cappuccini?!), fruit, vegetables, icecreams, a hot dog and beer, and a roast chicken…

In the toys range, there is a toolbox complete with tools, a coffee set, and a jumping castle amongst other fun oddities, all made of felt.

Of course I don’t have the time, but I’m extremely tempted to get one of the patterns and make some… 🙂

Needle popping

Tonight we were reading back through the notebooks we wrote in when our kids were very little; the silly things they said and did, and their latest achievements. We were actually trying to find out when they crawled and walked, for a medical questionnaire. Do you think we recorded that anywhere? Nope!

One of the stories written in one of the books was this:
“Yvette was embroidering at dinner time. [No surprises there!] Youngest child said “Mummy is making an extraordinary noise!” as the needle went into the fabric.”

And that reminds me of when our eldest was quite young and my husband had been in trying to settle her off to sleep. I was working on the first project for our Mountmellick book, which was the large blackberry runner. Previously I had worked mostly with linen, which is not such closely woven fabric as cotton satin jean, and the needle tends to go through the fabric more easily.

So there I was, stitching away, with my fabric stretched nice and taut in my hoop. After settling our eldest, my husband came out and said, “What IS that popping noise?!”

It was the needle going into the fabric!

Testing for colourfastness

Yesterday I was considering doing some embroidery in red thread. It was Presencia brand perle, which I have not used before. So before I even put it anywhere near the white fabric I was going to use, I wanted to test its colourfastness (or “colorfastness” for those who prefer to spell it that way!)

I found a small piece of white fabric, cut myself a length of the red thread, and liberally wet them both until they were both completely wet. Probably soaking them both for a few hours would have been good too, but I knew that if I did that, I’d probably forget to take them out to dry, and I wanted to know the answer sooner rather than later!

I put the wet red thread on the wet white fabric and left it there to dry in the bathroom. The idea is that if any coloured thread is going to bleed, red is probably one of the most likely. In the evening, my younger daughter came out to me with it in her hands and said “Mum, you left this in the bathroom.”

Ah yes, thank you! It was dry and there was NO hint of any bleeding. Very nice to know.

The thread had been curled up in the centre of the fabric. I've moved it aside and you can see there is no bleeding.

And in the meantime I decided not to use red thread anyway, but at least now I know!

Christmas decorations

I’ve mentioned before that each Christmas I make tree decorations for my husband’s staff and my daughters’ teachers and tutors. I’ve been plugging away at them and have now finished the embroidery of 17 of them. I think that I have only one or two more to do.

What I have found interesting about this is that normally I hate doing any embroidery design more than once, and yet, I have been quite happy to do 17 of them so far! Maybe its just because I’m still so enamoured with the beautiful, beautiful, gorgeous, luscious single ply silk from Stitches and Spice that I have been using!

The design that I am working is going to be published in the next issue of The Gift of Stitching magazine in their Christmas ornament issue, so when its out, I’ll finally show you a picture. And you’ll be able to purchase a copy so that you can make your own if you’d like to! I’m really looking forward to seeing the other ornaments in the issue as well as they are usually very inspiring.

The thing that I have been enjoying about the silk is the way you can vary the look of it. For some of the stitches I have been untwisting the thread so that it sits flat and has great coverage. And for some of the other stitching I have been using it twisted as it comes. Its interesting to see the different effects you can achieve with the one thread.

The design also features a small amount of Gilt Sylke Twist, which is a thread that was developed to be used on the Faith jacket. I bought some quite some time back, wondering what I might use it on. It was terribly expensive, but I wanted to give it a try. It is very nice, and the little bit of gold that goes around the silk core does look pretty, but seriously I do wonder if its worth the expense!

Now, the thing I have been perplexed about for the ornaments is whether I should make some of them into bookmarks using the gold plated bookmark findings that I recently got. What do you think? (I guess it is a bit hard not knowing what the ornaments look like, but let’s just imagine a tiny pillow-like thing with embroidery on one side.) Would you prefer to receive a special bookmark, or a Christmas tree ornament? You could use one all the time, whereas the other would get put away only for Christmas use.