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Tag: hand embroidery

TAST: French Knot & Pistil Stitch

TAST: French Knot & Pistil Stitch

I’m still filling in my doodle cloth. It’s become kind if a free form sampler–a combination of practice stitches and experimenting. Pistil Stitch Generally speaking, I really like knot stitches and this is no different. This pistil flower is one of the experimental stitches. I like how these flowers turned out, generally, but will do at least two things differently next time. 1) I won’t use variegated thread for the petals because the individual flowers are not distinct enough. At…

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Iqbal’s Blanket

Iqbal’s Blanket

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…

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TAST Week 5 & More

TAST Week 5 & More

 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…

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Thread Solution

Thread Solution

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…

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TAST WEEK 4

TAST WEEK 4

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…

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TAST Week 3

TAST Week 3

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…

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TAST Stitch 2: Fly Stitch / Italian Border Stitch.

TAST Stitch 2: Fly Stitch / Italian Border Stitch.

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…

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Updates …

Updates …

… ‘Cause life keeps getting me behinder. The fires got close to Salem on September 7, 2020. My granddaughters and their parents are all safe, but their house is gone. Fortunately they have a house in Portland. Air quality since the 7th has been moderate to hazardous and I guess it will remain at the latter for a while, unless we get rain. Obviously, with hazardous air, I didn’t get restarted on walking in the park. My knee therapy was…

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