White Threads

Mountmellick embroidery in country QLD

This year, the Queensland Country Womens Association (QCWA) has the Republic of Ireland as their country of focus. To celebrate this, and to help them learn more about the country, they do a soft-craft and a hard-craft. I don’t know what they have been doing as their hard-craft, but their soft-craft has been Mountmellick embroidery – a fact that warms my heart!

All year I have been receiving calls from ladies all over Queensland wanting to buy copies of our book Mountmellick Embroidery: Inspired by Nature, and Mountmellick embroidery supplies with which to do their projects.

But now that there are so many Queenslanders out there doing Mountmellick embroidery, I want to see some of it! I am really hoping that there might be an exhibition of all these lovely Mountmellick embroideries at some time in the future that I might hopefully be able to go and visit.

Does anyone know if this is likely to happen? I know I have at least one QCWA reader – Yvonne, are you there?

book review: Historical Fashion in Detail

Today I have a book review for you of “Historical Fashion in Detail: The 17th and 18th Centuries” by Avril Hart and Susan North. This is an older edition of a book that is now entitled “Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Fashion in detail”. As I have not seen the new edition to see whether it is simply exactly the same book, but with a new cover and title, I can only review the old edition.

I love this book. It is full of gorgeous close-up photos of real garments from the V&A’s collection. And the photos are good. You can see real detail, including the individual stitches.

There are 10 chapters in the book, each dealing with a different aspect of garments, such as buttons; trimmings; slashing, pinking and stamping; stitching, seams, quilting and cording; and gloves and shoes. On the left-hand page there is written text explaining the example, and a beautiful line drawing of the whole garment. On the right-hand page there is a close-up photo of the chosen aspect of that garment on which the focus is laid. Several garments appear more than once in the book, with different aspects being shown in different chapters. The very famous Margaret Laton jacket is one of these.
There is so much to pour over in this book. I love looking at the pleats, marvelling at how much fabric they must have put into their skirts. And all this sewn (constructed) by hand – not by machine!

While there is a lot of embroidery in the book, it is not all embroidery. Some of the garments show the most amazing fabrics, the likes of which we don’t see anymore. It also focuses on aspects of garment construction. I found the section on slashing to be so interesting, as that’s a technique not really used anymore (that I know of, anyway!). As you might expect, I find that some of the whitework garments, using such techniques as quilting and cording, to be some of my favourites – they’re whitework after all!

At 224 pages, this is a book full of inspiration. I highly recommend it.

Historical Fashion in Detail: The 17th and 18th Centuries
Avril Hart and Susan North.
ISBN: 1851772588

In case you should want to chase up the new edition, it is:
Seventeenth and Eighteenth-Century Fashion in Detail
Avril Hart and Susan North.
ISBN: 1851775676

Share some of your embroidery?

With the Big Craft Show coming up next week (yes, I am exhibiting at the Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair, Stand G32, sharing with The Gift Of Stitching Magazine), I won’t have any extra brain space with which to be writing blog posts. So I was wondering if there are any of you lovely readers who would like to share some of your recent embroidery with all of us, so that we don’t get sad due to a lack of White Threads during that time?

I am planning to do some more book reviews of things off my bookshelf, but it would be nice to have a few other posts interspersed to break things up a bit.

Your embroidery doesn’t have to be of a certain standard. Just something that you’re proud of. And I’m sure most of you have a recent project (finished or still in progress) that you’re proud of.

So how about sharing it with us? If you’re interested, either comment below or email me, and I can get back to you about the sort of image/s that you’ll need to send me. Along with the images, I’d love for you to write a little about it, so that we can understand the thought processes behind it (if it is your own design), who the designer is (if that is not you), what you are particularly proud of about it, etc.

Thanks!

Hardanger bookmark finishing technique

I mentioned in my previous post about my Hardanger bookmark that I had used a new finishing idea for it, that I’d thought up in a lucid moment.

Rachel of Virtuosew Adventures asked if I would tell about the technique. Well, its nothing revolutionary, it was just something I hadn’t tried before!

I had planned just to have the sides of the bookmark go to the back and join with a seam. Because there is cutwork in the centre of the bookmark, it meant that the join needed to be at the side, because in the centre it would land right underneath the cutwork area.

I had then planned to fringe the ends of the bookmark back to the four-sided stitch, not unlike I have done on my Sapphire Hardanger Bookmark. However on that bookmark, it has four-sided stitch down the sides but not at the ends.

With this bookmark, I had four-sided stitch around the entire edge of the bookmark. I wondered if I could turn the the fabric to the back right at the edge of the four-sided stitch, along the sides and the ends. (Along one long side, I had left enough fabric to fold across the whole back, so that the back would be covered.) Then I could have the seam around three sides of the bookmark.

Rather than just making it a plain rectangle, I added a tassle in at one end. This was made from the perle coton 8 that I used for the Algerian eyelets. I used a simple ladder stitch to join the front and back and neatly disappear into the seam.

So, putting it simply, the technique was simply to make the seam along three sides, right at the edge of the four-sided stitch. I think it makes the edge just a little more decorative than techniques I had used before.

Nuts about needlepoint – left-handed book review

If you’re into needlepoint then you’ve probably already read this review. That’s because Nuts about Needlepoint is the blog to follow if you’re a needlepointer. It also happens that its author, Janet M. Perry, is left-handed. She kindly agreed to review my book The Left-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion.

Here’s some of what Janet had to say:

I am so delighted with the care and attention to detail present in this book. It’s beautiful, but very practical. With it I feel more confident to try stitches and techniques that have eluded me in the past.

She also said:

For every stitch I know I checked the instructions and they were exactly the way I do these stitches. I also checked several of the stitches against the ones in The Embroidery Stitch Bible and, sure enough, the illustrations in that book matched the right-handed illustrations in Stanton’s book.

I find this interesting as I’ve never knowingly seen a copy of The Embroidery Stitch Bible. Must be a case of great minds think alike! (wink!)

I’m sure you’ll enjoy reading the rest of the review here. And you’re highly likely to find other things of interest at Janet’s blog!

needles for knots

Following on from my series of posts on bullion knots, you may find it interesting that today Mary Corbet has a post about needles for knots. We did cover this in my posts, but its well worth reading some more about it.

You can read my original posts at:

finished Hardanger bookmark

Here’s the finished Hardanger embroidery bookmark. This is a thank you gift for Gillian, giver of the beautiful Turkish scarf.I used a new type of finishing for it, that I thought up in a lucid moment the other day, and was pretty pleased with the result.

I’m not entirely happy with the fact that the Algerian eyelets are so prominent in colour, but that’s ok. I’m not sure what would work better. Perhaps a lightish brown/beige colour of the type that’s found in the multicoloured perle cotton.

However, I’m reasonably confident that she’ll appreciate it anyway. I enjoyed making it!

Also, just a reminder: If you are interested in learning how to do Hardanger embroidery, I will be teaching a beginner’s Hardanger class for The Crewel Gobelin in Killara, Sydney, for three weeks, starting Tuesday 22nd June, from 10am to 12noon. You can see pictures of the project here. Please contact The Crewel Gobelin to enrol. I’d love to meet you there.

Mountmellick stitch along design

Well, I have come up with a design for our Mountmellick embroidery stitch along. It is lilies – I’m in a lilies frame of mind at the moment! I just think lilies can be quite exquisite, and they provide a nice amount of scope for embroidering both petals and leaves.
I know its rather obscured by the copyright note (!) but that’s for my own protection.

I think you can get a reasonable idea of how it looks though. I imagine that you could use this design in several ways: centrally on a cushion, over to one side on a cushion, on a bellpull, centrally around a bolster cushion, on a bag, or two together at their bases with one rotated 180 degrees to make a long runner.

The design is about 25cm long (10 inches). It is really important that it is used at FULL size, rather than being shrunk to fit a smaller area. This is because Mountmellick embroidery should be big and bold, and never small and dainty. If it was small and dainty then it wouldn’t be Mountmellick embroidery.

So the plan at this stage is: to start the Mountmellick embroidery stitch along at or near the beginning of July. You’ll need to get a copy of the design from me – I haven’t decided how to do this just yet. You’ll also need to purchase the authentic fabric and threads to use for the project, and I will probably put together some kits for this. You will also need some reference material from which to learn the stitches if they are not already familiar to you (this is a stitch along, not a class). I recommend Mountmellick Embroidery: Inspired by Nature or The Left-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion (if you are left-handed). Some of the stitches we will be using cannot be found on the internet – I will warn you of that now, so that it doesn’t catch you by surprise! 🙂

For further information about the stitch along, you can read the previous posts.

I hope you decide to join us!

a suitable thank you

I have been working on a thank you gift for Gillian, who presented me with the beautiful scarf from Turkey.

I’ve decided that a suitable gift is a bookmark, with Hardanger embroidery worked on it. I have no idea if she has any interest in embroidery, therefore if it is a bookmark, she can choose to park it in a book forever more if she doesn’t actually want to look at it often!

If you know me, you know that I particularly like Hardanger embroidery which is more in the traditional band style. However in more recent times, I have tried working with coloured threads, which is quite a departure for me, as I am a complete sucker for white on white Hardanger!
So here is the bookmark in progress.

stitch along – an overwhelming response!

Well, it seems like my Mountmellick stitch along idea is a good one, because I’ve had a very good response! Ok, now I just need to figure out how to fit it into my life…

Over the next few weeks, I’ll be spending most of my time getting ready for the Sydney Quilt and Craft Fair from June 16-20 (Stand G32, come and visit!). And then I’ll be at the show. I’ll be brain-dead when I get home each day from that, so I don’t think I’d be giving you my best if we did it then! But maybe in between all of that, I can get to designing a Mountmellick piece, and working out the likely amount of supplies.

Because of all that busyness, its likely that we won’t start until early July, as that will hopefully give people time to gather supplies. However, that means I need to get myself going on this so that I know what to put in the supplies list, so that you know what you need to get!

If you know of anyone else who may be interested, please spread the word. We may as well see if we can get as many people stitching Mountmellick embroidery as possible, so please post about it on your blog or on any stitching boards where you think people may be interested.

By the way, for those who are not familiar with the parlance, “SAL” is often used to refer to a “Stitch A-Long”. It doesn’t make much sense to me, separating the “A” out like that, but I guess it does make it more pronouncable… So if people refer to an SAL, now you’ll know what they’re talking about.

Well, this is exciting – a Mountmellick embroidery stitch along! I think it will be great fun to do. Thanks for your enthusiasm!