Free download during the Coronavirus lockdown

Posted on 3rd April, 2020 by Flights of Fancy

We all know that stitching is very therapeutic – so obviously we can never have too many patterns, especially now that many needlework fans have a little bit of extra stitching time!

So for as long as the UK is in lockdown for the Coronavirus, Mabel’s Hardanger design Home Sweet Home will be a free download (everywhere, not just the UK). It’s the full chart pack with diagrams and instructions, and it comes with a little extra chart for the alternative wording Stay At Home.

Enjoy – and do send us pictures of your completed Home Sweet Home!

Special birthday offer

Posted on 31st March, 2020 by Flights of Fancy

Tomorrow is April Fools’ Day, which also happens to be Mabel’s birthday (I’m sure this is not at all significant…) – her 50th, in this case. And Mabel’s Fancies has an anniversary coming up: on Easter Monday it’s nine years ago that she first opened her virtual doors. (I tend to remember it by the occasion rather than the actual date; Easter is a time of new beginnings, and Mabel’s Fancies was definitely a new beginning for me!)

What better way to celebrate birthdays and anniversary than by stitching something? So with any order placed between 1st and 13th April, we’ll throw in 1-2-3, our Hardanger set of numbers.

But what, you might say, if you don’t do Hardanger? Or if you do, but you’ve already got this design in your stash? Well, if you’re not a Hardanger stitcher, and have no desire to try it (this could be a great opportunity, you know ), you can contact us to request Spring Flowers (anniversary version) instead; and if we see from our records that you have already bought 1-2-3, we’ll send you A-B-C (our Hardanger alphabet) instead.

Enjoy your birthday or anniversary stitching!

A manageable frame

Posted on 30th March, 2020 by Flights of Fancy

If you’ve been following my RSN Certificate progress you may have picked up a hint or two (or three, or four…) that I do not like working with the slate frame. Well, that’s not absolutely true, I do greatly appreciate the excellent tension you get on a slate frame, and I rather enjoy doing embroidery in a way that connects me with stitchers from many centuries ago; what I do not like was its size, which means you have to use it with trestles, which in turn means that even with considerable added tilt, the work is still at a near-horizontal angle.

This seems to work for some, maybe even most people (although I have heard from at least one RSN graduate that she hardly ever uses a slate frame anymore because it “did her back in”) but I am hampered by my eyesight. Not only am I very short-sighted, I have protein deposits in one eye which cause blurring. Together they make it impossible for me to see the whole slate frame in focus when it is positioned on the trestles. I could reasonably comfortable work on the bottom third of the design, and also on the top third by the simple expedient of turning the frame round. It was when working on a particularly challenging part right in the middle of the design that I found the only way I could see well enough to do the stitching with the required level of accuracy was to stand up and bend over the frame. Doing my back in? I’ll say!

It was very clear to me that I needed a smaller slate frame. The RSN don’t do anything smaller than my present 18″ one, but several other people do, among them Jenny Adin-Christie, a former tutor and studio embroiderer at the RSN and therefore well-acquainted with what is required of a slate frame. It just remained to convince the RSN that I could, in fact, do the next three modules on a 12″ slate frame as the size requirements were so much smaller than for the Jacobean module (A5 max instead of A4). Initially they were not happy with the idea; it took a fair few emails (including mentioning that I would not be able to continue with the Certificate in the present set-up) and a promise that I would discuss it with my tutors, but in the end they did agree and the very next day I ordered my smaller frame.

It’s difficult to tell the size when seeing it in isolation, so here it is (with pinned lengths of herringbone band to help it keep its shape) on top of the old one – once on top of the covers and once showing my Jacobean piece, which actually very nearly fits!

The smaller frame would almost accommodate the Tree!

The main thing about getting this smaller slate frame was that I could dispense with the trestle set-up. But it’s obviously too big to hold – it needs a stand of some sort. On her site, Jenny Adin-Christie says this size can be used with a Lowery, although it will need support on the unclamped side. Well, that’s not going to be a problem – remember this?

But the Lowery is not ideal from a portability perspective. To use this frame at my classes it would be really helpful if it worked with the Aristo lap stand, the arms of which in their natural state are not quite long enough to support the slate frame at full stretch.

Once again, Meccano and Mr Mabel’s engineering expertise to the rescue! (He has modestly requested I show only his hands, not his face.)

And here it is, ready for use when I start my Canvaswork module (whenever that may be…)

PS By the way, the conversations with my tutors about the slate frame were interesting. One said that it was unusual but she had no doubt I’d manage as long as I could find a stand to use it with in class (sorted, see above); with the other, the conversation went as follows: “I’ve been allowed to work on a smaller frame.” “Yeah, that’s fine.” “No, but a much smaller frame.” “Yes, OK.” “I mean, 12-inch small”. “Yes, fine.” Well, that was obviously a big problem .

Some small projects

Posted on 24th March, 2020 by Flights of Fancy

It has been a shamefully long time since I’ve written anything here – this was partly because of trying to get things done (particularly all the SAL blog posts) before going away for a weekend (in Wales) and a week (in the Netherlands), and partly because even since those trips were cancelled due to Coronavirus I’ve been working on other websites that I look after (such as our Church’s) to keep them up to date with the latest advice. I also seem to be spending an inordinate amount of time foraging; all of a sudden I feel great sympathy for our grandmothers’ generation who had to spend a considerable part of their day shopping for food.

Meanwhile, the Figworthy household is keeping well, and in line with government advice both the main family business and Mabel’s Fancies remain open as they are online only. So work as usual, and stitching mostly in the evenings as usual, but although in some ways things haven’t changed too dramatically for us, I do find it difficult to concentrate on anything large and/or complicated. It was time for a few more small projects. And the perfect occasions were two birthdays: my aunt, whose 80th birthday I was meant to be celebrating with her in the Netherlands, and my sister-in-law.

For my aunt I turned to a set of number outlines I keep by for this sort of card, Anchor’s perle-with-metallic, some Petite Treasure Braid and petite seed beeds for added bling, and a spare piece of material left over from some old cushions.

It stitched up quite quickly but still looks suitably festive – not quite the same thing as celebrating her birthday with her (we were going to have a combined party for her 80th and my 50th) but I hope it will make her smile.

For the other birthday card, which had to be stitched in a single evening because I started rather late, I chose a Sarah Homfray freebie – a small butterfly. I changed the shape of the lower wings a little, and got out my box of coton à broder #16; a slightly chunkier thread so that even with mostly outline stitches it wouldn’t look too empty.

The bullion knots were a last-minute addition because the wings looked a bit bare without them. I did think of adding some detached buttonhole frills here and there, but as it was past 11pm by then I decided against it; they would have made an interesting addition but they weren’t absolutely necessary to make the butterfly look pretty. And in fact it was rather nice to know that a very decorative butterfly could be produced in a little under two and a half hours!

The next morning, Saturday, I had to make up the card in time to catch the 11am post – and preferably in time for me to still be able to go for my usual Saturday walk with a group of friends (observing proper social distancing). In my stash of cards I found a wine-red one with an oval aperture which would have been ideal if it hadn’t been just too small – I should have measured it first and adjusted the design size to it! Fortunately a dark blue card with a circular aperture made quite a good alternative.

Finally, before sending it off, it had to be inspected by the Quality Control Feline. She approved.

So what next? Well, there are a few things still to do on the SAL, and of course there is the Certificate Tree of Life – although what with classes having been suspended because of Covid-19 who knows when I’ll be able to hand it in for assessment. Not to mention that mounting it the proper way is not something to be undertaken lightly, as I have been told by other students, and really should be done with a tutor present. So for now my plan is to finish the stitching by 22nd April as I originally intended, and then to decide how to proceed. I may just take it off the frame and store it flat until I can go to a class to mount it, and in the meantime prepare as much as possible for my Canvaswork module. We’ll see.

I’d also like to get back to Hengest the Medieval Unicorn, who has lain neglected for far too long, and to start on Soli Deo Gloria – a good reminder in these uncertain times. But I will also start a few projects that are not my design, and which I can just have fun with. A smaller version of Percy the Parrot worked in coton à broder #25, a Sarah Homfray freebie flower (not sure yet what stitches I’ll use for that, but I’m thinking of using Palestrina stitch as a filling for the stem, with the knots offset in consecutive lines) and some designs from one of the small Anchor embroidery books, including a teddy bear for our grandson Teddy, and some aeroplanes for his room to tell him about his late great-grandfather who flew planes in the war. That should keep me busy for a bit!

Proud Percy

Posted on 6th March, 2020 by Flights of Fancy

Percy the parrot turned out to be the perfect travelling project, as well as the perfect relaxing project – no planning, no thinking, no note-taking, just stitching. Bliss.

He came out looking rather different from his inspiration, although in one respect he resembles the original more than I thought he would. You may remember I described the Anchor version as being worked in “colours (purples and blues and pinks on a blue background) that were not what I would have chosen” and yet here he is with blue and purple plumage and accompanied by a pink flower!

Some people have asked about the stitches I used, and also whether they can use them in projects of their own. The answer to the latter part of the question is that it’s not up to me to say yes or no to that! Embroidery stitches belong to no-one, so you can use any and every stitch you like. As for the former part, the picture below shows what I used where; the order in which I worked the various bits, as far as I can remember, was branch/feet & beak/leaves & flower/tail/chest/wing/crest/head/eye.

I pretty much used whatever stitch happened to pop into my mind when looking at the design; I decided on whipping the tail feathers each in a blue that was one shade lighter than the chain stitch, partly to create texture but mostly to make sure they weren’t just three separate feathers – the colours link them together. For his chest feathers I was originally going to use Mountmellick stitch, but I felt that was more spiky than feathery, and so I went for the more frilly look of detached buttonhole stitch.

Incidentally, for something that was meant to be relaxing and non-challenging I did occasionally make things unnecessarily complicated; at one point I was trying to get the shading I wanted in the branch by having three threads on the go at once, threading and re-threading because I’d only brought one needle. Sigh. Note to self: try and keep travel projects straightforward.

And after all that, am I pleased with him? On the whole, yes. There are a few things which I would probably do differently if I stitched him again (not an unlikely event – I’ve already printed out my pared-down version of the design in several sizes, the smallest to be used for cards) but I like his look, and I am partcularly pleased with his eye. It’s got character, that eye .

So what would I have changed? And am I being too fussy and self-critical, as so many stitchers are? To answer that last question first, I tend to look at anything I stitch with a critical eye, but with different aims in mind. I look at the RSN Certificate piece to find anything that isn’t as near-perfect as I can make it, and improve it if I feel that I can. I look at something like Percy with a critical eye in order to store up ideas for future projects. I’m definitely not unpicking and re-doing him – he is fine as he is!

But for future reference, I would divide the second-lightest bit of the wing into two parts like the part underneath it (in the middle shade of blue) – I think that would look more balanced. I would not use the rather bright shade of orange that is on the outside of the flower centre (the colour is shown more accurately in the close-up). And I would probably keep only his chest in purple, and use blues for his crest – although I must admit the purple crest is growing on me.

One thing which niggles me but which I won’t change because I think the alternative would look less effective is the placing of his tail in front of the branch he is sitting on. In the original, the branch is (correctly, from a perspective point of view) stitched over the tail feathers. But in the original the branch is a single line of chain stitch, whereas mine is a rather more elaborate affair. I feel it would break up the flow of the tail feathers too much (quite apart from making those feathers more awkward to stitch). And let’s face it, he’s not exactly a naturalistic parrot anyway! So in future versions as here I will allow Percy to show off his tail in all its glory.

Pretty threads and a parrot project

Posted on 21st February, 2020 by Flights of Fancy

In my search for inspiration threads for canvaswork I came across a job lot of Rainbow Gallery Silk Lamé on eBay. Will they be used in the RSN Canvaswork module? Perhaps. Certainly not all of them. But they are very, very pretty, and they came to less than half price. I succumbed.

These threads are for future projects, however, so we will put them aside for now and move on to the exciting topic of Travel Projects! I need a travel project for when we go and visit my mother-in-law. I don’t actually need a new travel project because there are at least four small existing ones, ranging from itty bitty (the Quatrefoil I started in order to try out the Quaker Tapestry transfer method and a padded rose about which I will write more in a future FoF) to a little bit larger but still fitting a 5″ hoop (the Ottoman Tulip and the kaleidoscope design I got from Oh Sew Bootiful). But you know how it is…

Some time ago I found one of those small Anchor embroidery books in a charity shop – there’s a whole series of them, introductory guides about 6″ not-quite-square. This one was about crewelwork, and besides stitch descriptions it also has photographs of projects worked using these stitches (although as quite a few of them are worked in stranded cotton or perle they aren’t strictly speaking crewelwork), as well as transfers for most of these designs in the back of the book.

One design that caught my eye was a parrot on a branch. True, because of the way the big circle around his eye had been stitched he looked rather grumpy, and the colours (purples and blues and pinks on a blue background) were not what I would have chosen, but in spite of all that he had that indefinable quality of Potential. This parrot could go places!

And so he will – to Devon, when we visit my mother-in-law . I wanted him to be a relatively small and simple project, so I left out quite a bit of the foliage when I transferred him onto a spare piece of Essex linen I had lying around. As for threads, I’m doing quite a lot of things in crewel wool at the moment so he is not going to be a proper crewel parrot; instead, I’m going to use some of the DMC floche I got from America several years ago. Because it’s so difficult to find here I’ve never felt able to use it in any of my own designs, as it would be difficult for customers from the UK and Europe to get the threads. But Percy Parrot here is just for my own enjoyment, so I can use whatever I like. I’ve put my whole (admittedly not extensive) collection of floche in the travel box so I can decide what colours to use as I stitch, and I haven’t got a stitch plan – he is going to be very free freestyle.

By the way, that little blue bird shape in the project box is a hummingbird needle threader – Mary Corbet wrote about it on Needle ‘n Thread and I found it was available in the UK as well for only a couple of pounds; it looks like a good one for threading the smaller needles, which isn’t always easy with regular needle threaders. The trick in using it appear to be that after you’ve pushed the little hook through the needle’s eye and hooked the thread you move the needle along the threader to slip it off rather than pulling the threader through. I haven’t used it yet, but I’ll let you know how I get on with it!

A two-stage transfer

Posted on 18th February, 2020 by Flights of Fancy

Last Monday at our weekly embroidery group a friend brought a kit which she’d been given for Christmas; it was a Quaker Tapestry kit. She’d got everything hooped up and was about to start, and she explained the first thing was to do stem stitch on the back of the work so that there would be backstitch on the front. We were all a bit puzzled about this, and I asked why she didn’t simply work backstitch on the front of the work. She wasn’t absolutely sure herself but said she was just following the Quaker Tapestry Stitch Guide which came with the kit. Several of us had a look at it and after a while we worked out why this was the first step: it was part of the Quaker Tapestry transfer method. I was intrigued and that afternoon bought a copy of the Stitch Guide myself (which fortunately could be obtained without having to buy a kit).

The trouble with the Quaker Tapestry and its kit offspring from a transfer point of view is that pretty much none of the usual methods work on the specially-woven woollen fabric they use. It’s too thick for a lightbox transfer, too textured for prick & pounce (even if the variegated colour didn’t make it difficult to work out what shade of pounce to use in the first place) – tacking the design on through a layer of tissue paper would probably work, but pulling every last bit of tissue paper out from under the tacking without damaging or at least fluffing the fabric would be challenging. So the Quaker Tapestry people came up with a method that as far as I know is unique to them. And it so happens that it looks to me like a jolly good method for transferring designs onto other “difficult” fabrics – dark, thick, textured or a combination of the three. I decided to have a go myself to see whether I liked it.

I didn’t want to use anything too big, so I fell back on my trusted little Quatrefoil. Wouldn’t it look rather rich and luxurious done on burgundy dupion? As this fabric is both dark and textured, it would make the perfect trial piece for this transfer method.

The first step is to transfer the design to your backing fabric, which you then hoop up with your main fabric. A few things things to bear in mind: firstly, as you’re working on the back of the fabric the transfer needs to be a mirror image of the design. Not a problem here as the Quatrefoil is pretty much symmetrical, but especially important to remember if there is any lettering in the design! Secondly, when you hoop up do so with the backing fabric facing you, to make sure you get the transferred design centred in the hoop. And thirdly, make sure the backing fabric is relatively densely woven, for example a medium-weight calico. I used a very open Egyptian muslin and regretted it because it makes it difficult to place your stitches accurately. (By the way, I am using these terms in the British sense; British calico is American muslin, and British muslin I think is American mousseline.)

Mounting the two pieces of fabric, centring the back

The front of the fabric, without transfer

The Stitch Guide tells you to fasten on with a knot at the front of the work (that is to say, the side you are working on as you transfer the design, which is actually the back), taking the needle down right at the beginning of a design line. You then come up a stitch length further along the line – this in effect makes your first backstitch on the right side of the fabric. You then go down a stitch length further, and come up again where you came up the first time. This makes the second backstitch on the right side of the fabric, but also sets you up for your line of stem stitch on the backing side.

You need to remember this “extra” stitch at the beginning of every new line, but you soon get used to that. I found it helpful to think not of how neat (or not) my stem stitch was looking, but of what the backstitch on the other side of the fabric was doing. Sometimes, especially on corners, the stem stitch will look quite ragged, and the thing is not to get hung up on that as long as the backstitch on the other side is correct. Keeping your mind on the unseen backstitch (quite apart from providing some good mental exercise) helps when you need to move from one design line to another, to make sure the whole line is covered on the right side of the fabric.

As I was going to stitch this little flower in Splendor silks, I used a single strand of the lightest colour for this transfer. The Quaker Tapestry Stitch Guide says you should use whatever colour will be used on the front, so that the transferred design shows the correct colours; mainly, I assume, so that the design lines are more easily hidden in the finished embroidery – if a little does peep through it won’t be so noticeable – but as an added bonus it would help the stitcher pick the right colour for the various parts without having to refer to the instructions every time. Still, I felt that would be overkill in a design as small and simple as this, and anyway as I was just quickly trying out the method I wanted to keep it as simple as possible.

The silks I picked for the design; the lightest colour only would be used for the outline

Looking at the emerging design lines, however, I wondered what would happen on the parts that were going to be outlined in split stitch. It might be rather difficult to work a nice even line of split stitch on top of the backstitch. Ideally what my transfer produced would be as close to paint or ink lines as possible, and as unintrusive to the stitching. An unattainable ideal from the very nature of things – thread is never going to be as flat as paint – but would a finer thread be the answer? I switched to Gütermann sewing thread and it definitely does make a difference: the teal arrow shows the outline done in one strand of silk, the orange arrow points to a part done in sewing thread. (The lilac arrow points to one of a couple of places where there is room for improvement in my stitch placement; a denser backing fabric – see above – would help.)

Gütermann sewing thread for thinner lines

Thinner and thicker lines, and a few irregularities

I can see myself using this method for goldwork on a silk dupion background, using the sewing threads normally used for couching the metal threads and wires: dark yellow where there is going to be gold, light grey for silver, dark orange for copper. Or perhaps for stitching on velvet or other difficult-to-transfer-onto fabrics. A useful addition to my stitching arsenal!

The home straight

Posted on 14th February, 2020 by Flights of Fancy

Last week I had my sixth class for the Jacobean module of the RSN Certificate, which means that we’re on the home straight. In fact, my homework is to finish the Tree before coming to my seventh class!

As usual, not an awful lot of stitching got done at the class, but there was plenty of learning and information-gathering going on. One student doing her Silk Shading module was trying out colours by cutting a print of the flower petal she was stitching in half, attaching it to her doodle cloth, and stitching the other half to match the photograph – a great idea, which I promptly appropriated (with her permission, I hasten to add) even though it’ll be a couple of years before I need it. Two others were working on silk shading and I picked up some good tips from listening to tutor Helen McCook’s advice to them. It’s never too early to start learning.

I did manage to finish the last row of the block shading on the right-hand hillock (had to start a new thread for the last five stitches or so – annoying!) and Helen said the lines are nice and crisp, so happy with that.

Running out of thread at an annoying moment

Going through my notes with her I decided I won’t outline the gap in the tree trunk (it’s neat enough as it is and doesn’t really need it), and that I will add extra padding to ball of wool – Helen suggested using full satin padding instead of the usual surface satin, as the bulk at the back would help create more lift at the front when mounted. I’m all for a more ball-like ball of wool so I’ll give that a go.

Helen also asked me to sample the cat with broader stripes, as the narrow stripes didn’t look very smooth. I said that Lexi’s stripes were narrow and I didn’t want to lose the tabby look (for one thing Lexi would never forgive me); I’ve shown I can do smooth long & short shading in the sepals on the tulip so surely this can just be a bit more, well, furry? She said it wasn’t so much about the shading as the smoothness of the stitching. I agreed to sample some broad stripes. When I showed them to Helen she said, “That’s much smoother. And it looks all wrong, like she’s wearing a striped jumper.” Lexi is back to narrow stripes .

Next was the left-hand floral thingy (not sure what it is, really). I’d intended to start on the Bayeux part but fortunately Helen reminded me that you work back to front so first came the seeding in the back petal. Officially this should be followed by the Palestrina outline, but time was getting on and I wanted to start the laid work on the scalloped part of the front petal. As I was working on this Helen said, “Are you shading from light to dark?” To my mind I was shading from dark to light because I looked at it top to bottom, but she meant looking at it from the base. Apparently (although no-one had thought to tell me this before) traditionally the darker shade is at the base of the flower/plant/petal/leaf, as indeed it is in the tulip sepals. I explained I’d never heard of this and I’d just chosen what looked pleasing to me, and she said that was fine.

I got on with trying to fill very curved scallops with very straight laid stitches, making sure that the edges were crisp and no outline was visible. A challenge. So challenging, in fact, that I unpicked my first five stitches or so three times. It was then that I had a light-bulb moment. One of the reasons why it was extremely difficult to get the edge to look neat and crisp and so on was that my dark thread contrasted very strongly with the fabric. What if I used Helen’s traditional shade order and started with the lightest of my shades? The scalloped edge would probably be no neater, but it would look neater, and the dark shades would be used at the bottom of the shape where there were no nasty curves to navigate. I’m afraid I didn’t take pictures of the top-dark version, but take it from me, the top-light version does indeed look a lot better!

That’s where I got to at the end of the class. With my next class not until late April I now needed to put this away for a while and concentrate on the Tree of Life SAL, but I did just want to finish the left-hand flower and the little diamond that connects it to the branch. First, the Palestrina stitch outline of the back petal; on my various colour plans this was sometimes dark orange, sometimes light orange, and on the last one two oranges and a light brown, which was never a good idea. In the end I went with the light direction as shown by the trunk, so the right-facing parts are done in light orange and the others in dark.

On to my Bayeux petal, and time for some shading. I’m very pleased with how that’s come out, and the outline isn’t too shabby either – no need to cover it up. (I’d intially included a decorative outline stitch in the design, but both Helen and Angela said that an extra border stitch around laid work immediately makes the assessors think there is something messy to hide.)

Next was the long couching lines, and an interesting challenge – where to fasten on and off? There is no outline to sneak stitches under, no area that will be covered later… In the end I very gently pushed aside the laid stitches and hid the anchoring stitches underneath.

It was only when I’d completed the two stages of couching (long dark brown lines across the laid foundation held down themselves with tiny beige stitches) that I noticed not all the long lines were the same thickness (Appleton’s – grrrr). Well, I’m not going to take them out; I’m happy with their placement and I don’t want to do it again (pictures in a future FoF will explain why)!

Finally, the little orange diamond at the base of the flower, consisting of alternating light and dark bullion knots. It’s not a perfect diamond but it is a little less elongated than the doodle version I did some time ago, and the design lines don’t show on the real project, so I call that progress.

By the way, what a difference lighting makes – here’s the Tree as it is lit when I’m working on it (light coming from the top and the work nearly horizontal), and photographed with my husband holding it up (facing the window with the work nearly vertical, and at a 45-degree angle towards the window but still vertical).

The Tree, photographed vertically, facing the window

The Tree, photographed vertically, angled towards the window

Now on to mounting (a challenge in itself) and then canvaswork – and to encourage the creative process I’ve treated myself to some inspirational threads!

Rainbow Gallery threads plus one other from West End Embroidery

Certificate progress

Posted on 4th February, 2020 by Flights of Fancy

Tomorrow is my 6th Certificate class, and I have done my homework. Most of it. Some of it. I have finally realised that my estimates of what I will get stitched between classes is ludicrously optimistic so I will just be pleased with whatever bits I managed. For this class they are, in order, a snail, a leaf, a water sample, and part of a hillock.

I wrote about James the Snail in as much detail as anyone is likely to want in an earlier FoF, but I will just show him again here because I’m chuffed to bits with him!

I shouldn’t have started with James, really; he is definitely the crowning glory of the piece so far, so all the other parts will have a hard time living up to him. Heigh-ho, I’m afraid you’ll just have to be disappointed .

Next up was the leaf on the right of the tree, which was going to have scattered ermine stitches in the centre. “Scattered” implies “random”, a concept I have had to work on. I am inherently a symmetry nut, so I fully understand people who panic at a workshop when being told to “apply beads at random”. For those people (and for myself, when I’m not in a random mood) I generally provide one non-random pleasing pattern, and one way of being random in an organised manner. The latter method was the one I adopted for the leaf.

That meant drawing the ermine stitches on my sample cloth and stitching them there (also to see whether I could get all five shades of turquoise in – I could!), then tracing them, deciding that some of them needed to be moved, pricking the tracing with those necessary movements in mind, and using the pricked tracing to put guide dots on the fabric.

Drawing the ermine stitches on the sample cloth

By this method I managed to resist the temptation to put all the ermine stitches in a regimented symmetrical pattern. I still feel the urge to unpick and move some of them to look less random, but I’m ignoring it. This is my scattered leaf!

You may remember the tutors and I couldn’t quite work out what to call the stitch I was going to use for the border – it wasn’t brick stitch, because it would be worked in long lines instead of rows, but it was bricked. However, I wasn’t sure how consistently I’d be able to keep up the bricking because of the very curvy and pointy bits of the shape I was filling. So we decided on “backstitch filling”, which covered all bases. Compensating for the curves and for the fact that the border isn’t equally wide all around was a bit tricky here and there, and my stitch length definitely isn’t uniform around the leaf, but I’m happy with the overal look of it.

Incidentally, as I was editing the close-up photograph I’d taken of the finished leaf I noticed something I hadn’t seen while working on it: a visible bit of painted outline. Although it is sometimes possible to very gently scrape the paint off the fabric, it seemed a better idea to put in a few extra stitches – it would smooth out the outline at the same time as covering the paint. Fastening on and off was a bit fiddly with no suitable areas nearby, but I managed to sneak them underneath existing stitches to keep them invisible.

As it is really only possible to work on the actual project by daylight, I put in a little sampling on Saturday evening. Along the bottom of the hillocks there will be a few lines of waves worked in fly stitch couching. Previous samples (not for the Certificate) had been in fairly rigid lines, but I wanted to experiment with lines that would vary in height along their length, and possibly also have an undulating couched line (originally I had intended the v-shapes of the fly stitches to represent the waves, while keeping the lines they were couching straight). As I had a sample cloth with the left-hand hillock on it, I stitched a bit of sea/river along the bottom, and although the fly stitches are perhaps a little higher than I’ll make them in the proper piece, I like the effect of the wavy lines – they are definitely in!

I had hoped to finish both the block shading and the Bayeux stitch floral element, but I could see that wasn’t going to happen. I settled for two-thirds of the block shading (well, it’s more than that actually as the rows get progressively shorter and I’ve done the two longer ones). The first thing I had to decide on was the corners of my rows. The RSN Crewel book shows block shading with straight edges – that is to say, the very first and the very last stitch of the row are horizontal and cover the full height of the row. But my corners are much sharper than the ones in the picture, and it would mean having a sort of fan of stitches there in order to get from the horizontal to the proper stitch angle for the rest of the arc. My worry was that that would get bulky where the fanning stitches met, so I worked some slightly shorter stitches instead, keeping the direction of the stitches near the corner.

I bounced this off Angela and she said that was the right way to go about it, so on with the rest of the row. Having completed it I was quite happy with it! The top edge is smooth, the corners are neat, the stitches aren’t crowded (something Angela had asked me to concentrate on), the stitch direction changes gradually, and – yay! – the row is virtually the same width all along (unlike my earlier samples).

Unfortunately, because of the nearly horizontal position of the slate frame, I see the work at an angle, and wool stitching having quite a bit of body, that means I can’t actually see the fabric right by the far side of my stitches unless I lean over, which is not a very good stitching position. It meant that I didn’t notice until I was about two-thirds of the way through that the teensiest bit of design line is visible at the top of the hillock. A bit of a dilemma, as this will cost me points in the assessment; on the other hand a dilemma that wasn’t too hard to solve – I’d just produced the larger part of a very respectable-looking row of block shading and there was no way I was going to unpick it all! The risk of ending up with a row that covered the paint line but looked much less nice than this one was too big. It’ll have to stand.

In between work I found time to complete the second row of shading, with some tricky voiding for the ball of wool; the third row (a light brown) will have to be done at the class, and hopefully that Bayeux leaf as well. For now, this is the state of the Tree at the start of my sixth class:

Bad lighting and a medieval Mabel

Posted on 30th January, 2020 by Flights of Fancy

We all know how important light is in needlework. I loved finding out that medieval Guild regulations forbade owners of embroidery workshops from making their needleworkers stitch by artificial light – they were allowed to work during daylight hours only. In these modern days we have much better artificial lighting available, and Mary Corbet wrote on her blog once that if you were thinking of getting a magnifier or special glasses, she’d suggest looking at your lighting first. Get the right light and you may not need additional magnification at all!

When stitching in the evening (my usual time, Guild regulations notwithstanding) I will admit to needing both if I’m doing very detailed work, but my Serious Readers floor-standing lamp does make a great difference. Even so, much the most comfortable way of stitching is during the day by the floor-to-ceiling window overlooking the garden; I still need my special glasses, but it is definitely less of a strain on the eyes.

Stitching by the window using the slate frame

Stitching by the window using a seat frame

When I mentioned bad lighting, however, I was actually talking about a different kind of lighting – but like the lack of good lighting to stitch by, it has lead to a substantial amount of unpicking.

This is Llandrindod with all the facets completed on the coloured stones. Very pretty and colourful. Sit back and enjoy before moving on to the facets on the diamond and the surrounding gold. But wait – notice anything about those coloured stones? About how they catch the light?

That’s right. The blue, purple and green stones are in agreement, but the red stone has different ideas about where her light source comes from. We are suffering from a case of Llandrindodgy lighting!

And I had paid such attention to the direction of the light when I was designing this and deciding on colours and stitches. I printed out a large coloured version to keep by me as a reference. I must have looked at it hundreds of times over the past months. And I Did Not Notice!!!!

There was no help for it – it would have to be unpicked. And split stitch is just about the worst stitch to unpick, so what that meant in practice was that the majority of stitches would have to be cut and teased out, all the while making sure I didn’t catch the satin stitch centre or make the stitches on the edges of the other facets unstable. It took 75 minutes, but I am now ready to put in the correctly lit facets. Well, once I’ve oversewn the cut ends at the back, as they are far too short to fasten off in any other way – after peering at tiny cut stitches for well over an hour I wasn’t going to do that by artificial light, however good, so that awaits some daylight stitching time.

To return for a moment to medieval embroiderers, I was delighted to discover from an article in the big Opus Anglicanum book that the first professional embroiderer of whom there is documentary evidence was a Mabel. I obviously chose well when I picked my nom d’aiguille (like a nom de plume but for stitchers). The book tells us that “Mabel of Bury St Edmunds was commissioned in 1239 to produce an embroidered chasuble for the shrine of St Edward the Confessor at Westminster Abbey, at the behest of Henry III. The chasuble, which was embellished with pearls and gold work, and lined with canvas and fine silk, took two years to complete, and must have been extremely elaborate.” Go Mabel! I shall endeavour to live up to her example.

Flights of Fancy

Mabel's musings on anything stitchy

Yearly Archives: 2020