A quartet of quickies

Posted on 17th June, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

Last Thursday I was working quite happily on one of the stitched models for Three of Diamonds, when I remembered that I needed to write four invitations; we’re asking some friends to afternoon tea next month and I wanted to get the invitations to them in plenty of time – people often have such a lot to do in the summer! You can make some really nice invitations on the computer using clip art of teapots and sandwiches and I was about to do just that when I stopped, shocked at myself. There was I, a stitcher, planning to make invitations on the computer!

Surely it should be possible to whip up something stitched, preferably different for each of our guests? Time constraints (I wanted to hand out the invitations at church on Sunday) meant it couldn’t be anything too elaborate, and it should be something I could do in different colours (the easiest way of making them all different). I decided on the little motif I’ve been using to try out different fabric and thread combinations, and which also forms the basis for the Mini Kits. A piece of Hardanger fabric that would hold all four was quickly found, mounted in a 6″ hoop and marked out with pencil. Now for the colours. Thinking it would be easiest to start from the cards, I picked four from my stock and then set out to find Caron threads to go with them. They turned out to be Cameo, Blue Spruce, Iris and Burnished Coin.

It’s a motif I’ve stitched so often by now, especially in its woven-bars-and-dove’s-eye version, that I don’t need a chart for it and can just stitch away. Now to decide how to attach them to the cards. Well, double-sided tape is my standard method, but I still needed to decide whether to stick them on straight or at an angle, and whether to cut the fabric straight or with chamfered corners. Having gone for the straight position with chamfered corners I then managed to stick one of them on while the card was upside down. Oops.

Never mind, we’ll just put the text on the other side of the stitching and pretend we intended to make one different all along. And here they are, written and ready to go! Now for deciding which biscuits, cakes and sandwiches to make …

Walking with Windmills

Posted on 10th June, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

No, it’s not the Dutch version of Walking with Dinosaurs – it’s an old Dutch saying (this reminds me terribly of the television series “To the Manor Born”, where the aged mother of one of the main characters used to preface many of her remarks with “we have a saying in old Czechoslovakia”, said in a strong Eastern European accent. But I digress). Walking with windmills, or “met molentjes lopen”, means to be a bit batty. But before you start worrying about Mabel’s sanity, let me put your mind at rest; I was merely reminded of this saying because I am trying to decide which fabric to use for Windmills. I’m hoping to start stitching the model when I’ve finished work on Three of Diamonds and Badges, and I’m really looking forward to it!

When I designed Windmills I intended to use a hand-dyed fabric, probably very light blue and white, to look like a summer sky with fluffy clouds (known in the Old Country as sheep clouds). I’d also picked a thread – Caron 154 Firecracker, a striking and rather patriotic red white & blue. Unfortunately when I got the thread it wasn’t quite what I had expected; the colours weren’t as disctinct as I’d hoped, so there was some slightly muddy purple between the red and blue. It’s a perfectly good thread and I’ll use it one day, but not for Windmills.

I put the design on the back burner for the time being, thinking a suitable thread would turn up some time. And it did. It’s a Threadworx perle called Bradley’s Balloons and you need sunglasses to work with it. It is bright, it is bold, it is brilliant, and when you first see it you wonder what on earth you could use it for. I love it, and I think it will be just perfect for Windmills; those little toy windmills you used to get on the beach were never very subtly coloured either, were they?

So now I just need to decide on the fabric. There are two candidates, both from Sparklies: a medium/light blue called Caribbean Blue, and a light blue/white called Summer Skies. Going by the names of course the latter seems the obvious choice, but I do like the richer blues in the other one. The thread seems to go well with either of them:

For the moment I’ll leave both fabrics out with the threads on top, so I see them every time I walk past the dining table (where a lot of my stitching stuff lives – which reminds me we’ve got friends coming to dinner next week so I’d better do some tidying up!) in the hope that eventually one of the combinations will show itself to be The Right One. Or I may just have to stitch it twice …

Storing stash

Posted on 5th June, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

Victory! I have finally wound all the Caron threads and other perles into submission. The next problem was deciding where to store half a dining table full of bobbins. Until now, all my Caron thread have been living in the top half of my dragonfly thread box; the bottom half, which isn’t divided into little compartments, held my #12 perles, some scissors, and a few spare white and cream perles. I decided to get two bobbin boxes, like the ones you use for stranded cotton, thinking that would be plenty – but they were smaller than I thought, and definitely smaller than the thread box.

There was another consideration; I wanted to try and keep the Caron threads together as much as possible. Ideally I’d like to keep all my threads together, but that’ll have to wait until I have my own craft room. For the moment they are rather scattered around the house, although I’m trying to keep certain brands or types of threads together. One thing that helped was the narrow chest of drawers which eldest son decided he didn’t want to take with him when he left home, and which I have now confiscated. It’s not perfect, the drawers are rather too deep, but it holds my fabrics, stock of squissors and coasters, finishing items, stitched models and some threads in a reasonably accessible way.

So here is how my Hardanger threads are now stored (there is quite a collection of other threads as well, but we’ll ignore those for the moment; let’s not complicate matters unnecessarily!) – to begin with, a box (decorated with Little House Needleworks’ “Necessities Sampler” on the lid) holding my balls of perle #12 and spare skeins of white, antique white and cream perle #5. It sits on top of the record player in the sitting room. I forgot to take a picture of its present contents, but here is a small photograph of the box:

Decorated box

My standard perle #5 are all cut into 1-yard lengths and attached to small wooden rings, then to larger metal rings according to colour. They are kept in a stackable plastic box. Two identical boxes hold my balls of perle #8. The three boxes are stacked in the bottom drawer of the chest of drawers, which lives upstairs in one of the bedrooms.

Anchor and DMC variegated perle #5, House of Embroidery and Threadworx perles likewise reside on rings in pre-cut lengths. They are kept in a box given to me some time ago by a kind friend who was looking for a good home for it. It has a tapestry top and is kept underneath a spare chair in the dining room.

Any other hand-dyed or silk perles, or other silks suitable for Hardanger, are wound on bobbins and kept in a standard plastic bobbin box. This holds Dinky Dyes, Weeks Dye Works, Treenway, Gloriana, Kacoonda, Vineyard and some one-offs, plus my Caron Snow threads (for reasons which will become clear in a little while). It sits on top of the tapestry box.

And finally, the dragonfly box. I estimated that it was probably just about big enough to hold all my Caron except the Snow threads, if I packed them in fairly tight. It is. Just. I think there is probably room for another 4 or 5 bobbins, so my future purchases will have to be carefully considered! I spent a happy hour or so trying to decide how to arrange the colours – not easy, but enjoyable – and between the first and the second picture below I constructed some dividers from a cereal box to keep the bottom bobbins neatly aligned. This box is kept on the chair that the previous two boxes are kept under.

And there you have it, my thread storage system! Rather scattered, and not particularly coordinated or uniform, but it works. One day, though, one day … I will have pictures to show you of my very own craft room with two or three (or four) cabinets full of drawers that are just the right size, and everything organised just so. But don’t hold your breath – it may be a few years .

Over the (Yellow) Moon

Posted on 3rd June, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

Summer seems to have arrived at last! At least I’ve got my first sunburn of the year – the consequence of falling asleep on the lawn last Saturday. I have some interestingly shaped patches of red skin now, but it was really very relaxing, dozing in the sunshine with the sound of birds and the smell of grass and all that. Add to that a lovely walk along the canal followed by a drink at a canal-side pub before dinner, and seeing an alpaca being born during our Ladies Walk in the morning, and it all adds up to a very pleasant weekend. I even managed to get the pile of 100+ skeins waiting to be bobbinated down to 18, which I hope to do at my stitching group this afternoon.

Hoever, that is not what I set out to write about. Some time ago I showed you the foam purses and notebooks I bought from Yellow Moon, and a bit later the purses adorned with Art of the Needle. This gave me a taste for foam, so to speak, and browsing through the Yellow Moon catalogue I found all sorts of interesting items. Last Friday I received my parcel, containing lots of things to experiment with.

One of them was a set of foam blanks in the shape of flowers and butterflies. I got this mainly for the flowers, although as they turned out to be rather bigger than I thought it might be possible to decorate the butterflies with two small projects, one on each wing.

More practical (well, a little more practical) are the Christmas tree baubles and keyrings. The foam blanks attached to the keyrings are fairly large, but then that would just make them easier to find in your bag! Any stitching will have to be attached quite securely, though, as it will be handled a lot. Perhaps I’ll advise people to use them only for spare keys that live in a drawer or on a hall table … The baubles are glued on one side, so you push your photograph/artwork/stitching in from the unglued side and then glue it shut. These are perfect for mini designs, whether cut or uncut. I rummaged through my workbox and found a few minis I had done earlier (including the blackwork snowflake freebie), which turned out to be just the right size; I haven’t glued them in place yet, but they give an idea of what is possible.

Some mini projects mounted in foam Christmas tree baubles

Finally I got something which was not quite the size I wanted, but I thought if I studied the kit I could then make my own from large sheets of foam with exactly the dimensions I want. These are Bible folders (they also come as book folders, with a bookworm design on them; the bag on top, by the way, is a selection of foam cross-shaped beads I got for our Church’s Sunday school), but of course they could equally well be needlework folders! Not, perhaps, with the supplied decorations, so they will be donated to our Sunday school together with the cross beads, but you get the idea: sew a folder out of foam, using cord or perle or whatever, with a slit to take the tip of the flap to close it, and decorate the other side with a piece of needlework (either sewn or stuck on, hemmed or buttonholed or with a frayed edge), and hey presto, a folder to keep your finished projects in before turning them into framed decorations or useful objects. Or you could keep charts in it, or even the threads and fabric for a project-in-progress. if this one works, I’d like to create a folder with a gusset. If I do get round to it, you’ll see it on FoF!

Folder kit - foam, cord and plastic needle

Winding ways

Posted on 31st May, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

Remember all those threads I got from the Little Thread Shop, not to mention several smaller lots from West End Embroidery? Some of these were Threadworx, which come in pre-cut lengths and are therefore put on little wooden rings like my standard perles, but most of them were not, and so they need to be wound on bobbins. There are a lot of threads on our dining room table waiting to be wound on bobbins …

The trouble with winding bobbins from skeins of Caron or hand-dyed perles is that they don’t always behave the way they should. Ideally, you take the label off the skein, unloop it if it’s been looped together once or twice, and then you’re left with a sort of ring of thread – start at one of the cut ends and unwind from the skein as you wind onto the bobbin. Simple. Unfortunately these skeins, which are often twisted, have a habit of tangling most annoyingly as you unwind them, however gradually you do it, leading to a lot of muttering-under-the-breath and stopping to undo knots. One way of keeping the untwisted skein from misbehaving is to ask a kind person to hold it looped around their hands while you’re winding (as in Harold Harvey’s Winding Wool, below), but I felt that this was probably too much to ask of my helpful and supportive husband in view of the quantities involved.

Harold Harvey's painting 'Winding Wool'

One way which I have used in the past is derived from the kind-person-holding-skein method and involves looping one end of the ring of thread around my knee with the other end lying in my lap. (A version with the ring of thread looped around both knees not only proved to be unworkable, but also caused such loud guffawing in anyone who happened to see it that even if it had worked I would have given it up.)

The one-knee method is far from ideal, however, and so I started looking for what you might call a pair of mechanical helping hands. I temporarily considered the two little thingummybobs that hold the sheet music on the stand of the pianola, but as that would mean sitting with my back towards anyone else in the room for hours on end I dismissed it. It did put the idea of music stands into my mind, though; my own (used many years ago for guitar lessons) is unfortunately of the sort that is like a flat lectern, but my husband reminded me that youngest son’s music stand was one of those folding metal affairs. Would it work?

It did . So this weekend it will be me and my music stand, tackling bobbins and skeins. And done in this way, it is actually quite relaxing!

Buttonhole edging and a new release

Posted on 21st May, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

Well, when I say “a new release” I am being a little bit premature. The stitching has been done, the stitching has been finished in a useful and (I hope) attractive way, everything has been photographed – now I just need to write the chart pack, which includes drawing diagrams for turning inside and outside corners in buttonhole edging. Let’s say I hope to have it finished some time this week. Or month.

The design in question is Art of the Needle, three small buttonhole-edged patches created specifically to decorate the little foam purses I bought a while ago. (I’m about to start stitching another set of small designs, Three of Diamonds, to go on the notebooks.) Working the buttonhole border was actually less boring and time-consuming than I remembered – it was quite relaxing, and once I’d got into a rhythm, fairly quick too.

The challenge was always going to be cutting the designs free from their surrounding fabric. After all that Hardanger, cutting really should hold no terrors for me, but cutting next to Kloster blocks you can see what you’re doing; cutting as close as possible to a buttonhole edge your scissors are half-hidden! I knew I could do it though, as some time ago I designed and stitched a tray cloth for my mother-in-law’s dolls’ house, which meant cutting around a buttonhole edge stitched on 60ct silk gauze, and that held, as did my practice piece on 36ct evenweave (on my finger tip, below), so I told myself not to be a wimp and get on with it.

The first thing to do is to pull out the fabric threads that run closest along the line of buttonhole edging. This gives you and your scissors something to aim for.

When you then fold the fabric away from the little “tramline” that’s been formed, you can see the buttonhole edge sticking out beyond where you’ll be cutting. This is a reassuring sight. Yes, it means that, as I said, your scissors are half-hidden by the overlap, but crucially it also means that you don’t actually have to cut dangerously close to your stitching, as any small cut ends will be covered by the overhang!

If the buttonhole edging is square, that’s all there is to it (apart from a little bit of extra trimming around those rounded corners). But what if the edge is scalloped or stepped or whatever you call it? Obviously you can’t just pull out the thread nearest to the edging. (Slight digression – actually, if you’re not careful, you can. On one of the Art of the Needle designs I pulled too firmly on a thread that should have ended in a corner, and pulled it out completely, leaving a small “tramline” within the design. Fortunately it was almost completely covered up by some French knots.) Back to the way things ought to go: pull the relevant threads loose up to the buttonhole edging (see below), then cut them close, and do the rest of the cutting as before.

Having done the first of the three patches as described above, I then tried pulling all necessary threads (the long ones along the outer edges, and the short, partial ones along the stepped corners) before doing any cutting, and then simply cutting all the way round, including trimming the rounded corners. This worked well and was definitely quicker, although it is also made it easier to nick stitches while going round corners; you can’t tell now, but the largest patch did need a tiny bit of glue to repair one of the corner stitches …

Another thing to remember is to check the back of your buttonhole edging every now and again while stitching. Somehow (and I’m still not quite sure how) I’d managed to move from one stitch to the next by means of a tiny stitch over one fabric thread – imagine stitching a Kloster block and not doing all stitches in the same direction, but doing the first top-to-bottom, then the next bottom-to-top. This, of course, would have come undone when the fabric next to it was cut, so before cutting I secured it with a few discreet stitches on the back of the work. Don’t tell anyone.

So after all that (and the discovery that I miscounted and two orange double cross stitches are one thread out) here are the three patches, cut from their surrounding fabric and then sewn onto three foam purses with running stitch to make a set of attractive project pouches (just right for keeping the threads, beads and ribbons for individual projects separate).

Art of the Needle sewn onto project pouches

A bicycle ride and Australian kindness

Posted on 18th May, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

This morning I went off to our church to help with a coffee morning. The three local Baptist churches are sending a team to India this summer to help with a school and various other things, and so a lot of fundraising is going on – today was a sponsored bike ride or walk around Draycote Water, a local reservoir, with coffee and cake at the church afterwards or throughout the morning for anyone who simply preferred cake to exercise. When I arrived at the church it turned out that there were about 30 cakes, and about as many helpers, and about half that number actually cycling or walking!

Well, I may be exaggerating a little, but it was obvious that the coffee morning was going to get along very well without my help, so I went back home, dug out my trusty Dutch bike (back-pedal brakes, no gears, sit up very straight) and completed two laps around the reservoir (5 miles each), the second lap without getting off my bike to walk up the steeper bits *yay!*. I even overtook two of our teenagers on their whizzy modern bikes – although I will admit that this was probably because one of them had some chain trouble.

It was a lovely ride, with gorgeous views over the surrounding countryside, oodles of swallows or swifts or martins skimming the water for insects, a duck with a train of ten ducklings behind her, one of the girls from church doing part of the lap on a unicycle, a wagtail and a crested grebe; I really ought to do this more often!

I came home feeling very virtuous having done all that exercise, and for a good cause too (if anyone would like to sponsor me retrospectively, drop me an email!), and picking up the post on the way in I noticed an envelope from Australia. What a lovely surprise: Stitchinkitty from the Cross Stitch Forum had sent me eight skeins of lovely Australian hand-dyed perles! The brand is Minnamurra, which she tells me has been discontinued; a shame, of course (the more thread hand-dyers out there the better) but it does mean I won’t feel guilty if I don’t use them in some new design – I can just use them for my own pleasure and enjoyment. Aren’t they lovely?

My parcels have arrived!

Posted on 15th May, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

Having been held hostage for a week by Customs (don’t get me started on the extortionate Royal Mail handling fee!) my two parcels from Margaret at the Little Thread Shop arrived yesterday. Unfortunately work doesn’t stop just so I can play with new threads, so it had to wait until the evening. I’d sent Margaret two rather long lists of Caron Watercolours and Wildflowers, and on the invoices it said how many of each she was sending but not which particular numbers, so although I knew that one Watercolours and about five Wildflowers weren’t available, I didn’t know which ones. The first thing to do, then, was to sort through them, a very pleasant occupation and one that my husband thought deserved a photograph (apologies for my bad posture).

And here is the complete haul, in numerical order. Already I’ve identified some very promising combinations, like Old Brick with Turmeric, and Caramel with Almond (apart from the Old Brick it’s beginning to sound like a recipe! Mind you, some of them do look good enough to eat). The parcel also confirmed how good Margaret’s customer service is – one of the Wildflowers she didn’t have was Parfait, but she sent me a skein of Blossom at no charge saying it was quite close to Parfait and might work (it does).

One of the things I did notice while having my little thread feast was what a difference dye lots can make. I have two skeins of Watercolours Caramel (one I bought in Holland because I didn’t remember it was part of my order from Margaret) and they are really completely different colours, one more golden brown, the other almost with a reddish, brick-like cast. The pair at the bottom are Watercolours and Wildflowers in what is meant to be the same shade, Sunglow, but you can see from the picture that although they look good together, they are definitely not the same. No fault of Margaret’s at all, but it is another reminder that there really is no substitute for seeing the threads in the flesh (or in the fibre), and also that if you’re going to need more than one skein for a project you’d better make jolly sure they’re the same dye lot!

Now all I have to do is wind them all on bobbins …

Border control

Posted on 13th May, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

One way of finishing pieces of stitching, whether they become bookmarks or table mats or bell pulls or patches, is to give them a decorative and sturdy border (“hem” would probably be a better word, but “Hem control” wouldn’t have been such a good title ). The emphasis is on “sturdy” – it’s easy enough to work a line of running stitch and fray the fabric up to it, and I recently saw a finish where the fabric was frayed up to a border of Kloster blocks, but although that would probably be fine for projects that get stuck on cards, or the tops of boxes, they probably wouldn’t stand up to a lot of handling.

At the moment I’m working on several sets of small and even smaller designs specifically intended to be used with foam items like the notebooks and purses I showed you last week, and also with smaller foam shapes to make ornaments. Some will use the frayed-edge finish, some will be attached with buttons, and some will have a more use-proof finish. But as I am stitching the models, I am reminded why I use these first-class, grade A borders so little. They are very time-consuming! On the other hand, they do produce pieces which will stand up to handling, and which can be displayed as they are, or easily attached to a background (for example a cushion or a bag). Below are a few examples of long-lasting borders: hem stitch (not used in the pieces I’m working on at the moment), four-sided edging (shown here on Percival, used as part of the design on Faith Hope & Love and the Guildhouse needlebook) and buttonhole edging (progress picture for Art of the Needle; not cut out of the surrounding fabric yet).

White on white

Posted on 7th May, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

Last month Serinde commented on my Stitching in the Netherlands post saying she’d like to stitch some Mabel designs in traditional white on white. Serinde is at least partly responsible for the existence of Mabel’s Fancies as she greatly encouraged me when I started doing Hardanger, so I take note of what she says! And so, instead of working on planned projects as I ought to, I stitched Song of the Weather February in white on white. What do you think, Serinde, does it work?

Flights of Fancy

Mabel's musings on anything stitchy

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