White Threads

Colourful gift

Yesterday I showed you the beginnings of a gift for a friend. At the time I wasn’t very happy with it, and suspected that I would end up taking out most of the stitching.

And I did!
This is the new version of the embroidery. I finished the red wiggly chain stitching. I can live with it! I took out the yellow/green buttonhole and replaced it with long-armed palestrina stitch. I removed the French knots and replaced them with nicer, more evenly spaced French knots. I added some purple silk cross stitches into the spaces around the red wiggles. Finally I worked a round of green silk buttonhole at the outside edge.

I still don’t know what I’m going to make it up into. I’m calling it a brooch, but I am not sure if that’s what it will end up being, or how. Need to let it mull over further in my mind yet… Stay tuned.

gift for a friend

This weekend we’ll be celebrating a good friend’s 50th birthday. (Carina, if you are reading this, stop now!) I would like to make her a gift because she’s special!

She likes bright colours. My first thought was “Oh dear, I don’t do bright coloured embroidery.” I was envisioning garish brightly coloured Hardanger! But then I realised, that of course I do brightly coloured embroidery – isn’t that what most of the embroideries in my stitch dictionaries were like?!

So out came the coloured felt and the threads. I think I’ll either make an embroidered brooch, or a necklace pendant (not sure how that would work, but we’ll see!). I started it yesterday, and am not very happy with it yet.
I’m not very enamoured with the French knots or the yellowy-green buttonhole stitch. The curves of red chain stitch aren’t particularly nice curves, but I think I can probably live with them. Hmmm… maybe not. I’ll probably pull most of it out before I’m done with it!

SAL: still buttonholing

I’m still pushing along (or given our recent – still resultless – federal election here in Australia, perhaps the phrase to use would be “moving forward”) with the buttonhole edge around the Mountmellick embroidery cushion.

I hope yours is progressing well too, wherever you are up to in the project. Anyone want to share how you’re going? Have you posted pics on your blog or on a Flickr account, or something similar?

Embellish magazine

There’s a reasonably new textiles magazine on the Australian market called Embellish. Its focus is shibori, embroidery, and other textiley things. I got in contact with the girls there a while ago to send them a copy of The Left-Handed Embroiderers Companion for review.

A few days later after receiving their copy, one of the editors Michelle, got back to me, asking me if I would be interested in contributing to the magazine, embellishing a garment with embroidery for each issue. I thought it was worth giving it a go! Michelle commented that kids clothing often has embroidery on it, and why should us adults have to miss out?

Michelle sent me a shawl and said “Do something with this.” And so I did. The resulting project features embroidered and beaded roses, and you can see it on the left of the cover. Its simple enough that its achievable quite quickly, even if you’ve not really done much embroidery before. And it makes an ordinary garment quite special.

In the next few days the new issue – Issue 3 – of the magazine will be out in newsagents. In there is the review of The Left-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion, and the first of my embroidered articles of clothing. My favourite thing in the magazine was an article on a shibori artist called Amy Nguyen. Her work is amazingly beautiful!

So if you haven’t seen this magazine yet, give it a go!

SAL: things for finishing

If you’re doing the cushion, you’ll need a couple of extra bits to make it up. Firstly, you’ll need access to a sewing machine, unless you’re hard core and don’t mind doing it by hand(!). White machine sewing thread will be helpful.

You will also need a cushion insert to stuff the cushion with. You can make your own, or purchase one, as I did. Mine is 35cm square (14inches). Yes, this is bigger than the size of the cushion itself, but I like my cushions to be well stuffed, and I often find that by buying a larger size cushion insert, the cushion ends up looking much more plump.

You’ll need a 25cm (10inch) zip in white. I forgot to measure the opening before I purchased mine, and got myself a 30cm zip. This will end up being slightly too long, but I’ll just cut it down to the right size. There’ll be no problem with that.

For both the cushion and the runner, you will need a pair of metal knitting needles for knitting the fringe. You will need a pair of any of the following:
2.75, 3 or 3.25mm
UK size 12, 11 or 10
US size 2, 2-3 or 3
I use double pointed needles, simply because they are shorter than full-length needles. There’s no real need for this though. I just find it convenient. They MUST be metal. Plastic, bamboo or tortoiseshell will simply break. We will be knitting with 4 strands of cotton yarn – that means NO give in the yarn at all. If you’ve got any arthritic tendencies, chances are, the knitting process is not going to be fun for you. I’m very sorry about that.

Ethiopian restaurant

Firstly I just want to show you that I have not made much progress on my buttonhole edge around my Mountmellick embroidery stitch along cushion – but at least I have made some!

The big news of the day is that there is an Ethiopian restaurant in Sydney!

The African Village Cafe and Restaurant
359 Chapel Road, Bankstown NSW
Tel: 9790 2696

A friend of my sister’s grew up in Ethiopia, and we have been discussing Ethiopian food. Her parents told her of an Ethiopian restaurant in Bankstown (the one I mentioned recently, which we had assumed must have closed as the phone number didn’t work.) She provided me with all the details, including a different phone number (the one listed above). I rang it, and seeing they answered, I made a spur of the moment booking for last night!

After doing so, I realised that my friend Belinda would probably love to join us, so invited her and her family along too. So off we all trotted to Bankstown last night. We arrived and it certainly looked like an Ethiopian restaurant, not just an African restaurant as the name implied. The owner told us that it definitely is an Ethiopian restaurant, but she called it The African Village because she thought that “African” would have more appeal.

We decided to have a combination platter, so that we could choose from 5 different dishes for all of us. We set about deciding which ones from the menu we would like. BUT, we didn’t realise that despite the menu saying “your choice of 5 different dishes”, it didn’t really mean that… The lady brought out her own selection of 5 dishes. Fortunately they were all very nice!

Later, we saw a couple come in to get takeaway. They sat down with one of only two (or so it seemed) menus, and proceeded to choose what they would have. Before long, out came the owner with two takeaway containers of food for them. They didn’t get to choose either! It was quite comical!

There were some other customers there who were Ethiopian, who when they realised that we had been to Ethiopia, and that our elder daughter could speak a small amount of Amharic, wanted very much to speak to her in Amharic. She was a little shy though (and I think felt a bit rusty with the language!).

The food was delicious and very reasonably priced. I can’t tell you what we had, because I’m not really sure! There was a mildly spiced split pea dish, a vegetable dish, a spinach dish, a spicy wat (stew) with lamb, and a very mild mince dish. All were very yum, though some of us are not keen on spinach at the best of times… The kids found the spicy ones too spicy, but we adults found they did great things for the sinuses (too much information?!). Belinda’s kids learned that my injera which they had at multicultural day, is nothing like real injera! The restaurant’s injera is even made partly with tef, which the owner imports from Ethiopia.

Ethiopian dishes are usually served in mounds on the large injera pancakes. You rip a bit of the injera off the edge – with your right hand – and fold it over some of the wat/stew/vegies to scoop up the food into your mouth. Then you rip a new bit of injera off and do it again. It can be a bit messy, but you do end up with the smell of the spices on your fingers afterwards, which is quite pleasant! You don’t use any cutlery because the injera is your cutlery (but you can always ask for some if you need it).

After the meal, there was Ethiopian coffee. I don’t drink tea or coffee, but I did have a sip of this coffee. To my completely uninitiated palate, it just tasted burnt, but to those who know and appreciate coffee, apparently it was really good. (What would I know?)

If you’re in Sydney, you can now sample the delights of Ethiopian food at The African Village Cafe and Restaurant. While you may not get the chance to choose your dishes, the food will be authentic and yum!

Classes in 2011

I have been taking quite a number of bookings for classes for next year. I teach Hardanger, Merezhka (Ukrainian drawn thread work), and Mountmellick embroidery. I am also currently devising some classes based on teaching and experimenting with unusual and difficult stitches. I am an accredited tutor with the NSW Embroiderers’ Guild.

If you would like me to come and teach at your shop, or your group, please enquire soon, as class opportunities are filling fast. Having a young family, I do limit my teaching each year so that I am not away from them too often, so you’d better get in quick!

If you are a shop, where possible I work with products you already stock, so that you can move whatever you already have. If you are a guild or community group, I can usually provide kits so that participants do not have to worry about sourcing strange or unusual supplies!

Something else I do

Not everything I do with my time is related to embroidery (however nice that would be!). I also do a small amount of freelance design and illustration work, seeing my degree is in graphic design.

Yesterday I spent most of the day working on some illustrations for Traumaid International, an amazing organisation that works with people around the world, but primarily in Africa, who have post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). When you read horrific accounts of mass rape, as I did in this week’s newspaper, you can understand that most of the people in such environments are severely traumatised. And this is just an account that made it into our western news. There would be many situations that we never hear of.

The powerhouse behind Traumaid is Dr Jennifer Dawson, whose research in PTSD has meant that her methods of treating trauma are having the most amazing results. Jennifer runs trauma workshops with survivors and community leaders in places around the world where large-scale disaster has caused trauma. She teaches the participants about why they react to situations the way they do – completely demystifying what have previously been baffling behaviours – and how they can work with their community to become whole again.

It is an absolute privilege to be part of this work. My part is to create pictorial depictions of the situations these people face, such as retraumatisation, inappropriate and appropriate ways of coping, and symptoms of trauma. Pictures work in these cultures, where literacy levels are often extremely low. And Jennifer’s work is having amazing results.

Below is one of the illustrations I have created for Jenny to use in her trauma training.If you’d like to read more about Traumaid, please visit the Traumaid website. You can learn more, donate, and those of you who are “quilty” type people, there is a “Quilts for the Congo” program, where you can create quilts for orphan children at the Baraka Academy in DR Congo.

Working on the new book

I had a lovely day yesterday working on my next book. It was so much fun coming up with new designs, and getting things on to the pages of the book.

I’m not yet saying exactly what the book is on, but a description might help to keep you all happy: its another historical whitework embroidery, featuring both drawn thread and surface embroidery. If you have an idea what style I might be referring to, please keep it under your hat!

A couple of years ago, I was at my embroidery guild’s library, searching for any eye-catching whitework in old books. As I looked through a 1960s book on styles of ethnic embroidery, there was one photograph that made me immediately think “What is that? I have to know more about that embroidery!” It was like nothing I had ever seen before, and I knew it would be the perfect subject for a book. Its very unique, and absolutely gorgeous.

I hope I have whet your appetite!

SAL: buttonhole edge

Today I traced the buttonhole cushion edge and the edge of the cushion pattern itself onto my fabric (you will have done this at the beginning). It matched up pretty well with my stitched bits, so I was pleased about that!

I have started stitching. I wasn’t sure whether to stitch clockwise or anticlockwise, (with the rolled edge on the right – or the bottom as shown here – as I am left-handed) but remembered that I usually stitch edges anticlockwise. Thinking about it, this is stitching my buttonhole in the opposite direction than I used for the petals right at the beginning. But this time it seems to work ok. I think the moral of the story is to stitch your buttonhole in whatever direction looks best at the time!

The thing that I think people often find difficult is knowing how to handle the scallop corners. It gets very narrow and there’s this sharp angle, all in the one place. So how does one make sure that its going to be ok, and for the sake of the people doing the runner (who will have to cut right to the edge of the buttonhole stitching) that the fabric will be held well enough not to fray?

This is how I have stitched it. As I’m doing the cushion, I won’t be cutting to this edge – I will have a seam just outside it instead.

If I was doing the runner, the scallops go the other way, being convex instead of concave – meaning that the rolled edge is on the outside point of the scallop, and the inside curve of the scallop. So apart from the fact that the buttonhole rolled edge would be on the other side of the stitching, I’d stitch it similarly for the runner: with stitches close together, angling them so that they are approximately perpendicular to the curve of the scallop, and keeping them as close together as possible at the point, without being ridiculous.

If you are doing the runner, please remember that the buttonhole rolled edge needs to be at the outside edge of the runner. You will be cutting to the edge of this buttonhole stitching at the end.

If you’re doing the cushion, the buttonhole rolled edge still needs to be at the outside edge, but you won’t be cutting to the edge of it. We’ll be doing a nifty seam outside it instead, and just sewing the fringe to the edge of the buttonholing to make it look like its a scalloped edge, but it won’t be. All will be revealed in good time if this makes no sense to you yet! 🙂

There’s a lot of buttonholing to be done in this edging, so please excuse me if I don’t have it finished by tomorrow! Oh, and I just remembered that I forgot to buy a zip and a cushion insert at the shops today. Oh well, next time I go to the shops I’ll try to remember!

Later edit: If you are visiting here on the recommendation of Sharon B from PinTangle, welcome! While you’re here, why not sign up to receive White Threads in your inbox each day? At the top of the right-hand column, there’s a little envelope symbol and the words “subscribe by email”. Click on either, and you’ll be given directions for signing up.

If you want to join in our stitch along, its certainly not too late. All the posts are still there, and you can work through at your own pace. I’ll answer any questions you ask. All the information you need to join in our Mountmellick stitch along can be found here.