pink daisies

Pink daisies, embroidered over the last three evenings. I just liked the simplicity of the design. It’s obviously intended as a border for something like a tray cloth but you won’t find any tray cloths in this household. So, what to do with it? I could turn it into a book marker but mine are now generally of the electronic variety so that’s a no.  If I repeated the pattern several times on either side I could have a large enough piece of embroidered fabric with which to make yet another tissue cover… Any better ideas out there?

 

addendum

I added some more colour to this little landscape by way of flowers. I tried sewing a mouse but it was too small to be recognisable and a snail just looked like a bunch of threads being unravelled. The spider at least looks like a spider, albeit short of a leg or four.

guilt-free

I’ve spent the past eight days in idleness and it’s been lovely. I haven’t done anything craft related whatsoever and I haven’t felt guilty at all. Shortly before mid-day however, after completing the umpteenth online jigsaw of the morning, I decided it was worth suffering jigsaw cold turkey and get back to sewing again. By this afternoon a small landscape idea was beginning to take shape for which the first step was to paint a semblance of land and sky onto the calico with watercolours. Setting the colours by ironing can wait ’til tomorrow, by which time I may have thought of something better to sew!

Pretty parrot fly away

Today has been spent keeping cool on a very hot day and stitching the rest of the parrot body then putting all the pieces together.

 

 

 

feeling better

Today I am feeling much better and I’ve hardly coughed at all. I’ve even been thinking of needles and threads and possible projects that I might sew or embroider. Today also, our internet connection suddenly re-established itself, after nearly a week of sulking and refusing to play. I neither know what caused the outage or the sudden reconnection, but I do know that this problem is occurring more and more. Another annoyance is that each time the telephone is answered, the internet connection drops out (when we have one that is). A check on the Virgin website via my unreliable phone showed that they were not reporting any faults but nothing I did with our modem fixed the problem. I was not best pleased to discover that we’ve been paying Virgin for our broadband internet service for the past eight years but according to their website, they don’t actually provide internet services to our postcode area! Who has been our internet provider then???  This week’s outage along with all the previous outages has made us consider a swift switch to BT,  in the hope that they can give us a speedier, more dependable service. It certainly can’t be any worse than it is. Can it?

As a result of not logging on to Feedly when I was with Big Sis, followed by several days when I just felt too unwell to sit at a computer, plus a week being denied internet access of any kind, I have 409 blog posts to catch up on.  Those will keep me busy for a while.

This embroidery of tansy was started on my journey northwards and completed before starting on the little buildings. I thought I might turn it into a slip cover for a notebook at some future date. Or not.  The towers piece was a stitch and colour trial for the buildings but I like it better than the tansy.

Watercress

I left the seed pod in Watercress for this morning when I could use the magnifying lamp to assist with the needlelace, finished it, took some photos and then realised that I’d forgotten to do the two small needle-woven leaves at the bottom of the stem but they’re done now. The next one to do is Coriander. Bet you can’t wait!

a little fluff and nonsense

I know that my version of Santolina isn’t true to nature and only partially true to Sachiko’s Marimoto’s instructions. I did use Turkey knot-stitch as specified, but the stitch is new to me and my brain couldn’t quite work out how to flip the right-handed method shown in a U-tube video, to a left-handed version that I could easily sew and I don’t suppose it helped that I was watching  Sean Connery pretending to be a Russian submariner at the same time. I practiced the stitch a lot but each time I thought I’d reached the Eureka moment, I lost my rhythm and forgot whether I was supposed to be doing a loop or a back stitch. Uncut Turkey knot-stitch is ideal for interpreting Santolina flower heads but instead of unpicking, I trimmed and fluffed them up and preferred the stitch that way but instead of Santolina I think I now have Knotweed!

Thyme and Dill

The Golden Thyme leaves were causing me much grief and a great deal of silent cursing so I moved onto Dill, with an abundance of theraputic french knots and some wire wrapping. Quick, easy and enjoyable.

There are eight leaves in the Golden Thyme project, all wired and needlelaced and you can see from the ruler showing centimetres in the photo below how small they are. The larger leaves are supposed to be constructed in a way that suggests veins but as you can see in (a), I hardly succeeded. I had already ripped out two previous starts and the cursing would have been vocal but for Big Sis being in the room with me. At that point I thought I might just not do Golden Thyme at all but that seemed like a cop-out so I then tried free-motion machine embroidery over a layer of organza and water soluble fusible web (b below), but although it looks more like a leaf, it’s not quite in keeping with the rest of the design. At that point I went away and did non-stitchy things for a while and then started on Dill but I didn’t want to be defeated by a few bits of wire and thread so I went back to the leaves, attempting one which doesn’t need to show veins (c below). This was more successful than (a), even though it’s smaller and therefore should have been trickier to sew. Perhaps I was just in the right place mentally. I haven’t finished all the whip-stitching around the edge which is why you can still see wire in places but that will be done in no time. I started on Santolina late yesterday afternoon and that’s nearly done but today I will make time to sew more thyme leaves and hopefully improve my technique before too long.

an easy one

I thought Camomile might take a few days because there was a lot of whipping of stem stitch and the five petals had to be overstitched with a single strand of embroidery floss but I must be getting quicker with my needle because I’ve finished it already. I began it late yesterday afternoon on my return from the sewing supplies shop where I bought colours I was missing for Lavender and French Lavender but somehow forgot to buy Blanc which was at the top of my list. Grrr.

Flax finished

Flax is finished and I’m already looking forward to starting on Wild Strawberry as the fruits are made by first stuffing berry-shaped pieces of felt stitched to the background fabric and then applying needlelace over the raised shape. I’ve done needlelace quite a few times but never on a 3D shape before. Another skill to learn!