Monthly Archives: July 2023

Boxing not-very-clever-yet

Posted on by

Well, I’ve started. In between tulips and leaves (and a dragon – more of that some other time) I’ve taken time out to work on the kit that came with the RSN Introduction to Box Making course. The pre-cut mountboard pieces (and oh my goodness am I glad they are pre-cut; Heather Lewis’ book puts a lot of emphasis on how accurate the cutting has to be, a challenge I am happy to postpone) are to be covered with fabric using two methods: lacing (expected) and double-sided sticky tape (very much not expected). The latter method feels remarkably like cheating, but as fellow C&D students pointed out on our FB group, the tape is not what holds the box together; it just attaches the fabric to the card for long enough to be able to sew the various parts together. If after sewing things together the sticky tape stops sticking or even disintegrates entirely, it doesn’t matter. It is only if the fabric has embroidery on it that lacing is a better option because of the added weight.

As I want to practice both methods I’ve decided to stick the yellow fabric (which will cover all the inner bits) and lace the patterned green fabric (for the outer bits). And I started with four of the larger yellow pieces, trimming and pinching corners but still not getting them quite as neat as I’d like (Marlous – her of the Stitching Sheep – suggested an additonal small piece of tape to aid corner neatness which I will try next time).

A covered piece of card A slightly too bulky corner

Things I learnt from those four pieces: 1) don’t cut the fabric too large, it leaves flappy unattached bits at the back; 2) even though you’ve pulled the fabric taut, sometimes there are small bulges along the edge, but when using sticky tape you can reposition these; and 3) it is very, very tricky to get the fabric folded around the card on the grain! One of the difficulties is that when you have stuck down two opposing sides and you move on to the other two, their corners are already fixed so when you pull to get the fabric taut you only pull the middle, leading to the grain curving rather than sitting tidily and neatly on the edge of the card. My trusty fellow students on the FB group, especially those who have already done the Creative Box module of the Diploma, suggested starting with the shorter sides rather than the longer ones as I had done, so I’ll try that next time, together with pulling the first two sides out towards the corners (i.e. along the edge of the card) as well as out at right angles to the card.

Fabric cut too large flaps about on the back Small bulges on the edge A curved grain

Now I was planning to take this course at a leisurely, not to say glacial, pace. Cover a few bits of card, put them away, cover a few more a couple of days or a week later, and then when all 19 bits are covered start assembling. But Marlous advised a cover-and-stitch approach because the sticky tape does allow the fabric to relax after a while (lacing presumably not so much). Having read Heather’s book about box making I knew that generally you start by attaching two sides and a bottom; I’d covered two long sides plus the bottom and top, so just cover a short side and get started, right? Wrong. This particular box has a false floor, and the supports for it have to be attached to the insides first. So I quickly covered one of the long supports (too quickly – I pulled the fabric too much one way, resulting in a fraying corner; tchk!), measured out 2mm from the bottom and sides of the larger piece to pinpoint the position of the support, and set about attaching them to each other. Fortunately the frayed corner could be put right at the bottom where it will eventually be snuggled up against two other corners so the fraying can be neatly tucked away.

A fraying corner Measuring out the support's position

All sewing together on boxes like these is done using slip stitch, also known as ladder stitch – I prefer the latter name because it is so descriptive of what the stitch looks like before you pull it together (shown below mitring a corner on my RSN Jacobean piece). As I mentioned above, on a basic box you start by sewing two sides together, but on this one the first thing is to attach the false floor supports to the four interior sides of the box. This means attaching one bit flat on top of another, and I suspect this is more challenging than stitching two edges together at right angles – at least I hope it is, because I found it quite challenging to get neat! Generally I am quite good at ladder stitch, but on this first piece the stitching is much more visible than I had expected/intended/hoped, even though I tried to get my stitches as low on the support edge as possible, and as far in on the main fabric as possible. Oh well, as long as I see improvement on the next three supports, I’ll be satisfied – this is after all my very first attempt at this particular discipline, and as I always impress on my own students, if everyone produced a perfect piece the very first time they had a go, what would happen to the teachers smiley?

Ladder stitch Stitching as close to the bottom of the support as possible The first support attached

The videos that form the main part of the course are very informative and helpful, but I do find that I miss not having written instructions. To some extend Heather’s box making book fills that gap, but that doesn’t, of course, mention this particular box. However, underneath every video there is a summary of what is covered in it, and I’ve copied and pasted that into a document, tidied it up and printed it out, so that as I am stitching away I can have a quick look at what I’m supposed to do next and how to do it without having to fire up the laptop. Most of those next steps will be yellow and not very exciting to look at – apologies for some rather monochrome updates! But I hope to get on to the floral fabric in the not too distant future.

Printed instructions and a lot of yellow

Stitching, unstitching, restitching and just one more stitch…

Posted on by

Looking back on my Canvaswork posts I realise I never updated you on my last class on 29th April. By 28th April nothing much had happened since the February class, but as I really couldn’t attend with nothing done at all I decided on some sampling. Helen McC had asked me to sample another background texture for the leafy jumble between the tulips, as she felt it needed three sizes rather than the two I’d done so far. She liked the staggered crosses, so I tried those using two plies of Caron Watercolours for the large crosses and one strand each of dark green and dark blue DMC for the small ones (the photograph shows only some of the small crosses done). By mistake I reversed the large crosses in the top row and found that I actually like the effect of that better with the other background (upright crosses) next to it, so that was a lucky error!

Sampling staggered crosses

I also sampled the smallest of the three textures, lazy kalem, using one ply of Caron Watercolours only (orange arrow), then adding a strand of very dark green DMC (green arrow), then adding a strand of very dark blue to that (blue arrow). I couldn’t see any difference that wasn’t accounted for by the Caron variegation. Nor could Helen J who taught the April class. So one ply of Watercolour it is.

Sampling lazy kalem

In class I played around with the medium-sized tulips behind the two very big ones, sampling split gobelin in Madeira silk which I liked apart from the colours (not enough blending) and a vertical herringbone variation in vintage silk originally intended for the pointy-petalled tulip which turned out not to work for any of them. A shame, because I did like the texture of the stitch. Perhaps I can use it somewhere else.

Sampling a split gobelin tulip The sampled tulip Sampling a vertical herringbone tulip

My homework for the next class, on 24th June, was to be the second hut and bush, the middle medium tulip and some more sampling for the pointy-petalled one. I managed one roof. Then the class was cancelled because too few people had signed up, and I cancelled one in early July because of a walk in memory of a church friend who had died suddenly and far too young. I was offered a replacement class for the one cancelled by the RSN on 22nd July, and decided to do some homework in preparation for that.

Looking at the roof I’d stitched, I didn’t like it. It’s a slanted buttonhole stitch with the ridge on the top, and the ridge was slightly irregular. I unpicked and restitched it. It was still slightly irregular, so I think I’ll just have to live with that! I also worked the rest of the hut, in horizontal satin stitches to depict the wooden planks, in two shades to show the shadow on the wood, and added two white lines to the roof because they are there in the photograph although I have no idea what they are. Finally the second bush, like the first one in Turkey rug stitch in a number of blends using crewel wool, vintage silk, flat silk and an anonymous matt twisted thread. I do dislike the fact that I’m not allowed to cut them until right at the end, because I can foresee that they will get horribly in the way! Still, it was progress. And then the RSN cancelled the 22nd July class as the tutors wouldn’t be able to get to Rugby because of the planned railway strikes. Oh well, at least it had spurred me on to do some work.

The re-stitched roof The rest of the hut The second bush

The cancellation meant that my next class won’t be until 19th August, a little under four months after the last one. Really, I should be able to show the tutor more than one hut and one bush! As we had extensively discussed the medium-sized tulips and some of the greenery, I decided to have a go at that. First the middle one of the three tulips; using Madeira silk as in the sampling, but more blended. In split gobelin, except where I wanted to indicate the line between petals, where the stitches would abut each other. I was quite pleased with how that turned out, apart from a little too much of the lightest shade (blue arrow). Still, I didn’t dislike it enough to unpick it smiley.

The stitched middle tulip next to the photograph The stitched middle tulip close-up

On to the left-hand tulip. I’d got some lovely Au Ver à Soie flat silk (Soie Ovale) for this tulip, but on reflection the shade was too peachy, so I went with some Eterna flat silk combined with one dark red Silk Mill silk. It uses the same split gobelin approach with abutting stitches for the petal line, and because I wanted that line to be quite clear, I found I had to work a tiny extra stitch before fastening off the lightest blend so the final stitch pulled in the right direction. The things you have to think of when doing canvaswork!

An extra little stitch to pull the previous stitch in the right direction

And then the tulip was finished. And I liked the colour and the blending. But. There were coverage issues, and more importantly, the shape was wrong. Somehow the tulip had got rather bloated, and compared to its intended outline it was too wide.

The left-hand tulip finished The left-hand tulip compared to its intended outline

The next day I bit the bullet and decided that it would have to come out. I printed the comparison photograph and marked it up to show which stitches needed to go. I also outlined the areas for the different blends, chucked the Silk Mill silk which has a slightly different texture from the Eternas, put new blends together and did as much prep as I could possibly do. Then some careful snipping and tweezering and the tulip was a fluffy pile of thread bits.

Marking up the tulip Getting ready to unpick Tweezering away the cut threads A pile of fluff

With twelve instead of ten strands in my needle (or rather, needles), I set to work; Eterna silk has been discontinued but fortunately I had enough left for this revamp! In marking up the tulip I’d also done some remedial work on the petal line, and fortunately I did much prefer the look of the restitched version (on the left in the comparison picture below). On consideration I should perhaps have kept that darker Silk Mill shade, but on the whole it is definitely an improvement, and much more like the intended outline. Phew! There are still some gaps, but I’m afraid they’ll just have to stay – more than twelve strands simply gets too bulky, and a major cause of the gaps is the fact that the stitches are split, which I can’t do anything about.

The restitched tulip

And finally, back to the middle tulip. Or rather, what I noticed when I started stitching it. The right-hand petal of my pride and joy, the big red tulip, was not as pointy as it should be!

A too blunt tulip petal

It was very, very fiddly fitting in one short diagonal stitch in Caron Watercolours, and even more fiddly getting the couching stitches over it. By doubling a single ply of Watercolours I could start with a loop start, which was one less end to secure at the back – a good thing as the stitching is so densely packed there that it is difficult to get a needle through to fasten off. For the two couching stitches I really needed two blends, because one had to be redder than the other, but I got around that by manipulating the four strands in the blend so that the darker strands were more prominent at the very tip (blue arrow), and the lighter ones at the stitch further in (green arrow). Was this tweak really necessary? Probably not; I doubt if anyone else would notice if I hadn’t added the extra stitch. But it was worth it for me, which is what counts in cases like these. If it doesn’t bother you, leave it. If it will irk you whenever you look at it, take it out and re-do it. You’ll be much happier for it smiley.

The diagonal stitch has been added The couching is in place

And that’s where it stands at the moment! Leafy stuff is my task for next weekend – after all the reds and pinks it’s going to be green, green, green. But all in silks and cottons, and not a trowel or pair of seccateurs in sight; very much my sort of gardening!

What the project looks like at the moment

Ticking all the boxes

Posted on by

I get the RSN newsletter. It tells me about exhibitions which I rarely if ever manage to go to, the Certificate & Diploma programme which I’m already on, the Degree and Future Tutors programmes which I will never do, and, slightly more dangerous, new classes and kits. Generally I am well able to resist both the kits (because I know the size of the pile of kits in my craft room) and the classes (because they are either at Hampton Court Palace which is impractical, or online which I don’t like), so I can safely take an interest in all the things the RSN do and organise without being overly tempted. But in the latest newsletter there was a link to a new self-paced course – online, true, but with the various instruction videos watched at your own convenience, as often as you like, at whatever pace you like. Almost like learning from a book, which has long been one of my favourite ways of tackling a new skill, but with the added bonus of having things demonstrated by a tutor over and over again if you need it. And unlike most of the other self-paced courses which I’d idly had a look at before, this one covered something which I have never had a go at before: box making.

The box that you will learn to make

Oddly enough I’d been thinking about box making only a little earlier because one of my fellow C & D students (Marlous, known as the Stitching Sheep) had posted a picture of her project for the Diploma Box Making module. And so this new course was definitely tempting. It got complicated when I went on the RSN website to find it, only to come across another box which immediately took my fancy and which was available as a kit. The curves, the tassle, the little goldwork bird on top – so much more attractive than the nice-but-plain box of the course. But also, very obviously, much much more advanced. Did I really want to risk getting what is without question a very expensive kit only to mess it up and end up with a wonky box?

An attractive bird box

I contacted the designer to ask her about the level of skill needed, and found out that although this particular RSN-themed version of the box was exclusive to the RSN, she was hoping to make the box available with a different theme (colour scheme, decoration) on her own website next year. Plenty of time for me to order and read through box-making course tutor Heather Lewis’ excellent book on the subject, do the beginners’ course and have a go at the curved box some time next year (or the year after – no rush), and so on to the Box Making module of the Diploma if I ever get that far.

Heather Lewis' book on box making

So I signed up for the Introduction to Box Making, and had a look at the first couple of videos which go through the materials and the course programme. Very informative and interesting, so I watched the one about two ways of covering the box pieces in fabric as well. Two days later both the book shown above and the course kit arrived – I hadn’t expected them to get here so quickly but it meant I could leaf through the book and have a leisurely look at the kit materials over the weekend. My very first look at the kit materials was a bit more rushed, as the box it arrived in was quite worryingly battered and our friendly postwoman waited patiently for me to open it and see if anything had been damaged so I could refuse to accept the parcel if that was the case.

A rather battered box

Fortunately all was well, except for a slight crease on the surface of one of the cut pieces of card, but as it wasn’t actually bent I don’t think it will be a problem. Mind you, I didn’t see the crease immediately as all the bits and pieces in the box came wrapped, either in a cardboard tube, a padded envelope or some pretty purple tissue paper, and I’d only checked to see those wrappings looked reasonably intact; well, I didn’t want to keep our kind postie waiting any longer than was necessary!

The box-making parcels that were inside the postal box

Then came the fun of properly unwrapping. The cardboard tube contained the two coloured fabrics for the inside and outside of the box, and white fabric with the word Threads printed on it for the embroidered lid, as well as some yellow ribbon. The padded envelope held the cut mountboard parts, one of them with the aforementioned crease. The purple tissue paper revealed double-sided sticky tape (yes, one of the methods for attaching fabric to the mountboard is sticky tape!), two tiny curved needles, embroidery needles, buttonhole thread, two colours of sewing thread and a skein of stranded cotton. There was also a welcome letter in the thin envelope with the picture of the box on it.

Fabrics Cut mountboard parts Sticky tape, needles and threads

All in all a satisfying collection of bits and bobs, but where to store them for the moment? I decided that the fabric would best be kept in the tube they came in, and all the other elements turned out to fit very nicely into the small purple bag that once held my RSN Certificate Welcome Pack; very appropriate smiley.

The bits and bobs fit nicely into my small purple RSN bag

Tempting though it is to have a go Right Away, there is Canvaswork to be done first. Several of my classes have been cancelled, either because too few people signed up for a particular session or because of rail strikes. Disappointing, but on the other hand I hadn’t managed to do much in the way of homework, so it may be just as well to have more time in which to get a reasonable amount done and have something substantial to discuss with the tutor. Since my last update here I have managed a small roof, a small bush and a medium-sized tulip – not much, perhaps, but it’s progress!