Monthly Archives: March 2012

A Caron giveaway

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Rejoice, rejoice – after some unpicking and a bit of a dilemma over the right shade for the lettering, the anniversary sampler is finished and waiting to be stretched over a lavender blue felt, if I can find any!

Lustrum anniversary sampler

In the process of trying to find the perfect shade for the Kloster blocks and satin stitch, I ended up with two skeins of Caron Watercolours 038. Both lovely, but of course I’ve only used the one that’s more lavendery; after all, that’s what the whole search was about! But what to do with the other skein, the mauve and cream one?

That’s an easy one – give it to another stitcher! Either to try something new, or to add to an existing thread collection. So if you’d like to give this poor unwanted skein a good home,

by the end of Sunday 1st April with your address and the answer to these two questions:

  • In Hardanger you use one ply of Watercolours – but how many plies does the full thread consist of?
  • The colour number of this skein is 038 – what is its name?

A random winner will be picked from the correct entries on Monday 2nd. Good luck!

Buying threads online

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Nowadays very few of us are lucky enough to have a needlework shop anywhere near us – let alone one that sells more than 14ct Aida and stranded cotton. For speciality threads or slightly more unusual fabrics you either have to travel a long way (there’s a lovely shop in Ilfracombe, for example …), bulk buy all your needlework supplies at a stitching show once a year, or buy online.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love the fact that I can get pretty much any thread or fabric I could possibly need (and many, many that I will never need but am tempted by nonetheless) by going online. I can get supplies from the UK, from my native Holland, and (if I’m willing to pay import duty and Royal Mail’s extortionate handling fee) from as far afield as America, Australia and South Africa. It’s great!

But sometimes, it’s just not good enough.

When I was trying to get three shades of beads (some of them variegated) that would match three variegated shades of Caron threads for Very Berry, I realised I hadn’t a hope of doing so unless I could compare the beads and threads in the flesh (or should that be "in the fibre"?) My husband very kindly took me shopping at Burford Needlecraft and I managed to find the exact shades I wanted – but trying to match them up on a computer screen would have been utterly impossible.

Very Berry

We don’t always have that option, though. Usually, the images on the monitor are all we have, and they’ll have to do. And so, what with the unreliability of online images and the differences in dyelots, buying hand-dyed threads online can lead to surprises when unwrapping your purchases.

Some shops do their very best to minimise these surprises, and are willing to go the extra mile for their customers. Stitching Bits & Bobs (US) has more than once helped me find the right shades by going through their stocks and finding a silk "a little more DMC 3042 than 3743", or some such description of mine. Sew & So have likewise been very helpful.

So I turned to them again when getting the threads for the anniversary version of Lustrum. I had decided on Caron 038, a very pretty shade I already had in Impressions (silk/wool), so I knew what it looked like in real life. On their site, however, the picture of the Watercolours thread in that shade looked much darker than the others in Caron’s range (Wildflowers cotton, Impressions and Waterlilies silk). When I contacted them I was advised to add a note to my order explaining that I needed the Watercolours and Wildflowers thread to be quite close in shade, and so not to send them if the Watercolours thread was really as dark as the picture suggested.

I don’t know how many dyelots they had in stock, but they managed to find me a Watercolours thread which was the same lightness as the Wildflowers thread, which was great. Unfortunately there was another snag – the Wildflowers they sent and the Impressions I already had were much alike in colour, with lavendery blues, pinks and creams, but the Watercolours thread had no blue shades at all and hardly any pinks, but was mostly cream and a warm lilac. (Click on the picture for a larger version.)

Caron 038

When I contacted them they very kindly had a look at the skeins of Watercolours 038 they had in stock, but they were all much the same, so we agreed I’d return the threads. I contacted a number of other shops carrying Caron threads, and several of them were extremely helpful. Burford Needlecraft sent a scan of the thread they had in stock, the London Bead Company looked at several dyelots for me and described them ("this one is more lavender blue, that one is more mauve, but the mauve one has more pink"). Both, unfortunately, were not blue enough. Finally I turned to Thread Bear, and after a few very helpful emails back and forth I picked one which I will now use with the thread I already have – Impressions is a little thicker than Wildflowers, but its matte appearance should make rather an interesting contrast.

Oh, and you’ll want to know what the new Watercolours looks like, of course! It is not easy to show the difference between two threads in photographs, but I think you’ll agree the new thread is definitely less mauve and more lavender than the original. So here it is, with the other threads and fabric that will make up the anniversary sampler.

Caron 038

One last variation

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Good news on the Frozen Flower front – the smaller of the two is finished, and I have finally succeeded in recharting the larger one so that it looks more or less the way I envisaged it, and is stitchable without having to wield two needles at once, or take your thread through half a dozen woven bars. Once the moving house card and the anniversary sampler are out of the way, it may even get stitched!

I’m all right for birthday cards for the next month or so, having done all those Round Dozen variations recently! This is the last of the lot – well, almost …

I used the cutting pattern of North and the satin stitch motifs from Noon, but with a Queen’s stitch border instead of a four-sided stitch one. This disturbed the balance, so I moved the motifs away from the centre. For decorating the uncut Kloster block squares I chose double cross stitch, but in perle thread rather than stranded cotton or silk, which makes them very 3D and textural, almost like very fat and regular French knots. I’ll certainly use them again!

Round Dozen variation

So why did I say this one was "almost" the last of the variations? Well, as I was charting three of these recent variations, I suddenly thought a spider’s web sort of surface stitch would make a great border too, as long as it’s for a card and not for a coaster. Not quite spider’s web roses or whipped roses, that’s a bit too much texture. So I charted it with a border of large cross stitches woven round, and of course I will now have to stitch it!

Building a Hardanger house

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What is the opposite of a housewarming party – a housecooling? I mean the occasion when people hold a party/open house/get-together in their old house before moving to the new. Whatever it’s called, we were at one last weekend, and as we were walking back home my husband said wouldn’t it be a nice idea to stitch them a Moving House card, and how long did the Moving House Turtle take to stitch?

Not very long, but of course I’ve stitched it once already, and wouldn’t it be much nicer to design a new card from scratch? So I set out to do just that.

Hardanger, probably. You should be able to do a Hardanger house. I’ve seen lovely designs where there is a cross stitched scene behind the Hardanger, visible through the cut windows. A wonderful concept, but I don’t want to pinch other designers’ ideas and besides, it would probably be too big for a card, and take too long to stitch. OK, no cross stitch behind it.

So I started with the outline of a house in Kloster blocks. Quite a simple outline, the sort that a child comes up with when you ask it to draw a house. Walls, sloping roof, door, window. It’s a bit bare, and there’s too little contrast between the roof and the wall. Obviously the window and door will be cut, but I can’t really cut the roof, it would look all wrong. As though I’m wishing them a new home with a leaky roof that lets in the draught.

Very well then, perhaps some sort of background stitch? I happen to have just the thing, a sort of basketweave pattern. Unfortunately it consists of bunches of three stitches and the Kloster blocks have 5 stitches, so a bit of fiddling is called for, but after a while the first draft of the Hardanger house is ready.

Home Sweet Home

The shape is all right, but it looks a bit dull, all those greys. I should use some colour. The roof might be thatched – I have a Caron thread with browns and mossy greens and straw shades that would be just right! A whitewashed cottage then, with white or off-white walls, and a variegated brown for the door and window frames. What about the filling stitches? They should suggest glass, so let’s use a pearl white metallic thread. It’s becoming much more colourful already!

Home Sweet Home

It needs a little more though. Shutters perhaps? I was thinking of Dutch houses with green, red and white shutters, and asked my husband what colour shutters like that would be in England, only to be told that English houses don’t have that sort of shutters on the outside. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Dutch shutters

Roses round the porch then? Using nice thick threads that make good, plump French knots. In red and yellow; or dark rose and dark gold, to fit in with the mossy greens and warm browns of the roof and walls.

Home Sweet Home

By now I’d decided to call the design "Home Sweet Home", and that made me think it would work as a sampler too. Something to hang in the porch or hall, to welcome you as you come in. But that would need words. In cross stitch over one, with lots of French knots scattered around it to echo the roses.

Home Sweet Home

And that is how you build a Hardanger house!

A proper blog

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Those of you who have been reading FoF for some time will know that I described it as "not quite a blog". It was just a page on Mabel’s Fancies – you could follow it via RSS, but you couldn’t sign up for email notifications, you couldn’t search the posts and you couldn’t comment!

So why the change to A Proper Blog? Well, I found a way of keeping it on my own site; and I thought it would be nice to hear from people who read it; and it was a nice challenge to my coding skills to try and make the blog look as much like the rest of Mabel’s Fancies as I could. And so here it is *drumroll*: Flights of Fancy, The Blog.

I’ve made sure that everything posted on the old not-quite-a-blog is here as well, just in case you’d like to look up some of the old musings. And of course you can comment on them now! You will have to register in order to comment, and people’s first post will be sent to a moderator before appearing – stitchers are all wonderful people who wouldn’t dream of posting anything rude or unpleasant, but unfortunately there are rude and unpleasant people out there who might sign up even though they aren’t stitchers, and one has to be careful.

if you enjoyed reading the old Flights, I hope you will find the new version equally enjoyable. And if you are new to FoF, I hope it will prove to be entertaining and perhaps even useful every now and again!

Another variation and a new stitch

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I may have mentioned that we have a lot of birthdays and other celebrations coming up … and so yet another Round Dozen variation has seen the light. I tried a different cutting pattern this time, leaving a central "X" of squares uncut and embellishing them with surface stitches pinched from Tulips.

It also led to a new filling stitch. Because of the shape of the cut areas (a rectangle made up of two squares) none of the usual filling stitches felt right, so I just doodled with my needle and came up with something half way between a square filet and a dove’s eye, which because of the shape I thought I’d call Gamma stitch. It may, of course, be out there already, and have a name too – in which case do let me know!

Round Dozen variations Round Dozen variations

Frozen Flower progress

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Frozen Flower is proving to be a bit of a headache; at least the larger of the two designs is. After tinkering with the bars and filling stitches several times I have decided that I will need to delete the entire cut area from the chart and start from scratch – as long as I try to change the existing pattern I don’t think I’ll be getting anywhere.

The process hasn’t been helped by the fact that so many other things are going on, from choir practice to church meetings and from school concerts to quiz nights (our team came third, in case you’re wondering). But this weekend I will have a bit more time, and my goal is to have Frozen Flower recharted by Sunday afternoon. To encourage me I ordered some perles I’d be needing from Sew & So, which arrived yesterday, so I’m all set to go!

And whatever happens to the larger Frozen Flower, at least the smaller version is coming along nicely. I like the way the blue and white work against the dark fabric, and I’m enjoying doing the woven picots, which fortunately are coming out pretty much as I’d envisaged them. It’s nice to know that even if the larger design turns out to be a lost cause, most of its characteristics will be preserved in this smaller one. And because the real fabric-and-thread stitching always looks so different from the chart, here’s a sneak preview of some of Frozen Flower’s 3D effect:

Frozen Flower

Variations on variations on a theme

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No, my fingers didn’t have a stutter when typing the title, nor did I have an accident with copy & paste. This is about variations on Round Dozen, whose twelve designs are themselves variations on a theme.

I always intended these designs to be just the right size for coasters and cards and so on – relatively quick to stitch, suitable for birthdays, new babies, anniversaries and Thank Yous, and easy to adapt to the stitcher’s or the receiver’s taste by changing the colours.

The ease of changing the colours was an important consideration when I designed them – it was one of the reasons why I went for one neutral and one coloured thread per design (and why I suggest 2 or 3 options for each of them in the chart packs). It meant that you didn’t have to worry about getting just the right shades together, or about needing four or five shades of one colour, or anything like that. It also meant that the designs were perfect as trial pieces for hand-dyed threads; you get to see your speciality thread in action, it doesn’t take very long, and you end up with a useful, versatile and decorative piece of stitching into the bargain.

So whenever I find myself in need of birthday cards in a relatively short time, I turn to these twelve. But having stitched them all as models for Mabel’s Fancies, I don’t really want to do them exactly the same, and so over the past months I’ve tried various changes. The easiest is to change the colour – here is East using a hand-dyed perle; I also exchanged the neutral thread for an Anchor perle with metallic running through it (the original is on the left, the variation on the right).

Round Dozen variations Round Dozen variations

Another fairly uncomplicated change is to use a coloured fabric; it makes quite a difference whether you stitch Spring using green on standard white, or with a variegated yellow/pink on a dark red background.

Round Dozen variations Round Dozen variations

But for the adventurous, there are even more options. The central Kloster block diamond is exactly the same size in each of the twelve designs; the double cable stitch border surrounding it in eight of them is only a little wider than the chain stitch border that is used in the other four; quite a lot of the small satin stitch motifs are roughly the same size; and the majority of the speciality stitch outer borders are interchangeable.

So if you like the satin stitch motifs and chain stitch of West, the outer border of North, the filling stitches of Morning and only the central square left uncut; or the cutting pattern of South with the filling stitches of Night, the satin stitch motifs of Morning and the border of Spring; there’s no reason why you can’t combine them.

Round Dozen variations Round Dozen variations

And then of course you can use different types of thread – here is a hybrid Summer/South, on coloured fabric, and using Gentle Art hand-dyed wool (which Tiffany, a generous fellow member of the Cross Stitch Forum, sent me to try) instead of perle #8.

Round Dozen variations

So let your imagination run riot, try different cutting patterns or no cutting at all, use two contrasting colours instead of one colour and a neutral, stitch on hand-dyed fabric, do whatever you like – and then send me a picture!

Stitching for an occasion

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Remember Lustrum?

Lustrum

The poor thing was intended as a celebration of our fifth wedding anniversary, but having charted it in two versions I foolishly decided to stitch the "neutral" version (without dates and initials, and with the cut areas shaped like shields instead of hearts) first; and of course the second version never happened, even though I have the hand-dyed material which I specially picked for it (from Crafty Kitten, worth a look) and the Caron threads to go with it.

The trouble is that there are so many things to stitch – and of course the latest designs usually shout loudest, winking at me with their dove’s eyes and crying "Stitch me!", "No, stitch ME!".

But things are looking up for Lustrum, as I appear to have entered a period bursting at the seams with celebrations of one kind or another (all of which need to be stitched for, of course), and one of them happens to be an anniversary. So I have blown the dust off its chart, deleted our initials and date and replaced them with the appropriate ones for this occasion, got out the fabric and threads, and …

… decided that they were quite the wrong colour. Well, after all, I’d chosen them for us, and this is a different anniversary altogether. After some thought I decided on light blue fabric with white or pearl metallics and a pale blue/pink/peach Caron thread. I’ve got the fabric and the metallics, but that particular shade of Caron I only have in Impressions, their silk/wool thread, not in the Watercolours and Wildflowers which I use for Hardanger.

There’s no help for it, I’ll have to do some stash shopping. How terrible.

The temptation of pretty threads

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When I started charting, I knew exactly what I wanted Flora to be (even though it didn’t have a name at that point): a simple design (or possible two variations) that would make a quick and attractive card for various occasions, floral in look, not too challenging in its bars and fillings, and using standard perles. The idea was that beginners would be able to tackle it and produce something pretty and useful relatively quickly, without the need to splash out on speciality threads they might not use again (although I’m always happy to encourage people to experiment with different threads, of course), while more experienced stitchers could use it as a relaxing little project between larger or more challenging ones, and would probably not need to buy anything but be able to stitch it from their existing stash.
I ended up with two variations, one in purples and one in pinks, though with a slightly more difficult filling stitch than I had originally intended (spider’s web rather than square filet). I defended this decision by telling myself I’d include instructions for the square filet as well, and leave the choice to the stitcher. Otherwise, it was still very much along the lines that I’d had in mind – nothing too fussy, quick to stitch, and using only standard DMC perle cottons.

Then I looked through my box of Caron threads for a completely unrelated project, and saw these:
Flora Threads

All right, so I cheated. But then people stitching this in future may want to use speciality threads as well, and surely it is my duty to try it out for them? Well, that’s my excuse, anyway, and I’m going to stick with it!

So that was the purple version taken care of. I decided to be a good girl when stitching the pink one and got the required DMC perles from my box for when I start Flora 2 tonight. But then, as I sat at my computer, I caught sight of a picture of Tulips. It uses beaded square filets. I’ve got some lovely yellow frosted beads that would go ever so well with the yellow perle used for Flora’s filling stitches …

So Flora’s chart pack will come with a variety of instructions – standard perles and hand-dyed threads; spider’s webs and square filets (beaded or plain). And plenty of choice for the individual stitcher. Let’s hope the individual stitcher likes choice!