I was sort of watching a soccer game. I drew the outer circle around a large spool of thread. After having so much trouble keeping the size even (I redid it twice), I found my circle stencil and drew two more for the orange and the inner yellow. The green, gold, and orange are week 8-buttonhole stitch. The center yellow is week 9-buttonhole wheel cup, although, I liked the look of the cup sides flattened in, so it ended up…
This is also TAST week 9–buttonhole wheel. It’s about the size of a quarter, done in perle 5. I don’t think this would be good on a functional quilt. The spokes (even the rim, actually) are too easily caught and pulled. Perhaps smaller circles and/or finer/heavier thread would work. I suppose I could also further embellish it or simply tack it down with a fine thread. I probably will use it on something “arty,” so it matters not.
It was a steady, visible rain, not a misty rain. Other than to note that, I didn’t pay much attention. The day before, and all week, was an off and on rain. I remember wondering earlier in the week where had the birds gone. Staying out of the rain, obviously. Today the birds are playing. From my chair in the living room, I am watching them flit around in the bare cherry tree, fly away, return. I think they are…
And unstitching. The white lace just wasn’t working at the bottom of that patch. That was my unstitching. I may end up putting in on the yellow patch. After much debate about which stitch to use on the right, I decided on this week’s Beyond TAST stitch — Tulip stitch. I used a variegated teal/turquoise perle 5 for the detached chain part and a brighter turquoise crochet thread (compares with perle 8) that has a thread of tinsel wrapped around…
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…
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 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…
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…