It started out as a Big Cloth à la Spirit Cloth. It’s still inspired a bit by Jude’s style of stitching, but is ending up a lot less freestyle stitching. This is partly because it’s being made to Iqbal’s wishes, since it’s for him and partly because I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m learning, though. So, it’s partly traditional and just a wee bit free spirit. I finally got it pieced last month. Piecing before embellishing is one of…
The stitches for this week were feather stitch and feather and chain stitch. (Stitch links go to Sharon’s Stitch Dictionary on Pintangle.) I’ve been doing the TAST stitches on an old doodle cloth I started with TAST a few yeas ago. I don’t really have a project for TAST this year and at some point last fall I decided I want to fill this cloth as densely as possible. The feather stitches are in the lower right corner. The dark…
I have a lot of hand embroidery threads. Mostly this is a good thing because I have a lot of options when I stitch. I had them all neatly organized in drawers by color . . . for maybe a minute. The thing is, the drawers are all downstairs in the studio. My studio is great for all my arts and crafts and machine sewing. I just don’t do hand embroidery down there. What I ended up doing, is putting…
It’s funny. I was just thinking how “it’s not summer” = rain because it’s the Pacific Northwest after all, but it’s blue skies and sunshine right now. . . . And now it’s not. Yeah, it’s February My mood is rainy though. Stormy. I’d just like to wake up not hurting/aching and more tired than when I went to bed. Maybe I can get Iqbal to the mattress store this week. That would help, if not cure the problem. Okay/…
I thought I knew how to do Portuguese stem stitch so I didn’t review Sharon’s how-to description carefully. I had these three flowers already stitched so I used it to make the stems. Then I read several posts that questioned if the poster had done their stitches right, so I followed a link to a Mary Corbet video. Nope! I had not done it right at all! So I practiced doing it correctly. As you can see, I also played…
TAST week 3 challenge was Buttonhole stitch and Reversed Buttonhole Bar. The bright yellow flower is Reversed Buttonhole Bar with regular buttonhole around it (2 strands of floss and perle 5). The stem is backstitch (perle 5). The dark gold flower is a spiraled overlapping buttonhole over a snippet of fabric (2 strands of floss). I didn’t like how it turned out, so I added single chain stitches (perle 5). That one’s stem is stem stitch (perle 3). The bottom of…
I don’t know who walked up onto my deck this morning, but I have never seen such big bird tracks before. The crows’ feet aren’t that big. I imagine something the size of a turkey. They are about the same width and half the length of my feet! (Yes, I do go out into the snow in bare feet,)
Yesterday, after finally clearing the creches off the mantel and piano, I decided I wanted a planned mantel. It’s always what I want, actually, but somehow never what I’ve had. I googled around and finally ended up reading at The DIY Playbook and got an idea what I’ve always done wrong. I was sure I had a “before” photo, but if I do, I can’t find it. It’s not in iCloud or on Flickr. So… I played around with GIMP,…
The sun (running stitch and chain stitch) and the evergreen branch in the lower right (fly stitch, stem stitch) were done about seven months ago. Today I added the the birds and the tree. The birds are Italian border stitch with two strands of variegated floss, one flipped to give 2-tones to each stitch. I think I want to add more birds. Many more. Darker, smaller, in the blue block. Not sure yet. The tree trunk is single fly stitches…
By the echinacea photo I took today