Hello (at last) Hengest!

Posted on 18th March, 2023 by Flights of Fancy

Once upon a time, in November 2018 to be exact, a polka-dotted unicorn named Hengest and inspired by a medieval cope made his appearance in the Figworthy household. Just on paper, at that point, and intended to be worked in silk and gold, Opus Anglicanum style. But before I got beyond raiding my silk boxes for pale pastels another idea presented itself – why not do him in wool? Which, in January 2019, I proceeded to do.

Although he stands a mere 10cm high (one hand, in horsey language) it takes a lot of split stitch to fill him completely! And there is only so much split stitch I can take uninterrupted by anything else. So Hengest was frequently put aside while I worked on other things (which got put aside in their turn for yet other projects), partly because there were some design decisions that took a bit of pondering. As he was nearing completion, two such decisions were left: how to create the spiralling effect on his horn, and whether to use beads for the gems on his browband.

That horn took a lot of pondering and sampling! Initially I came up with two ideas, both of which I sampled to see which I most liked the look of. First I tried tapering lines of split stitch along the length of the horn in medium gold, with the spiralling split stitched over the top in darker gold (left); I started with too shallow an angle so towards the tip I tried a more acute angle. Then I tried working the whole horn in short curved lines, alternating two or three medium with one darker (right). As it turned out, I didn’t like the look of either method. The one on the right lacked definition, and although the acuter-angled spirals on the left one were an improvement, they still weren’t quite what I wanted. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Then there was his bridle. Originally both this and his chest band were meant to be bejewelled. For his chest band I simply could not make that work, and in the end it was done completely in split stitch. But I have some drop beads in lovely medieval stained-glass colours that are just the right size for Hengest’s headgear. Surely I should be able to incorporate those?

Alas. I love those beads to bits, but they just do not go with the wool. Too shiny, too attention-grabbing, just plain wrong. Hengest was going to be 100% wool.

But as I had decided to leave the jewels until the very last – a colourful reward for finally completing my mostly white and pastel woolly equine – the horn had to be done first. I’d thought of a third method of doing the spirals, which at first I didn’t even sample because it meant diverting from my split-stitch-only approach. But as I came ever closer to the moment when it was either the horn, or packing Hengest away for another few months, I tried it out on one of my previous samples: a darker gold stitch across the horn, couched down slightly curved. Actually my sample wasn’t curved at all, but even so I liked the look of it: thinner (and to my mind more elegant) than a line of split stitch, yet visibly standing out from the underlying stitches.

On with it then! First a long line of split stitch along the centre of the horn right to the tip with a slightly longer than usual stitch at the end, then two lines down the sides, splitting into the long stitch at the tip. Fill in the gaps, and on to the couched spirals. I’m not entirely happy with the angle – if I did it again (which I won’t!) I’d make the angle sharper – but on the whole a handsome horn.

A line of split stitch down the centre of the horn

Next were the last of his flowing locks (which I would have worked in a slightly different order if I had been concentrating instead of racing ahead to the finish with the bit between my teeth) and then finally, finally, the bridle gems. These too are Not Split Stitch; in order to make them stand out I opted for padded satin stitch, horizontal underneath and slanted vertical on top, starting with a long central stitch from bottom to tip.

Vertical satin stitch over horizontal padding

The resulting gems are a bit wonky, partly because the gaps I had left in the surrounding split stitch were not entirely even, but then Hengest is quite a wonky unicorn anyway, and I rather like the hand-drawn quality of it. Quite in the spirit of the wonky horse on the Steeple Aston cope that inspired him!

Fruitful stitching and a transparent purchase

Posted on 23rd February, 2023 by Flights of Fancy

Sometimes you want to stitch, but you don’t want to have to think too much. And for me, that generally means stitching someone else’s design, because my own pretty much always end up as chart packs, kits or workshops so that every step of the stitching process needs to be logged in notes and photographs, and every design element and material checked for repeatability. So I have a number of kits which are tucked away in my craft room, patiently awaiting the day when they will finally be picked up and stitched – kits by wonderful designers like Alison Cole, Helen Richman of Bluebird Embroidery, Heather Lewis and Helen Stevens.

Three Bluebird Embroidery silk shading kits

Heather Lewis' Elizabethan Beauty kit and its bag

But sometimes even that is too much; because let’s face it, these are quite challenging projects! And then, leafing through a back issue of Stitch Magazine I came across a crewel design by Alex Law, a modern take on a Jacobean tree of life in bright citrussy colours. And on the tree – a pear…

A very small pear, a mere 3cm high, but such a satisfying shape, and such lovely stitches: shaded laid work, a lattice, an outline, all in green with some yellow shaded in, and a tiny orange stalk. I couldn’t resist. I hooped up a scrap of sateen, picked some of my favourite Heathway Milano crewel wools – not quite a colour match for the original Appleton’s wools but with the same bright citrus look – and got stitching at our monthly Cake & Craft meeting. Initial progress was not as fast as it might have been as I managed to start with the wrong green, but that didn’t spoil the fun.

In my off-duty mood I didn’t use my trusty maths triangle to get the lattice perfectly aligned, but just eyeballed it. It turned out a little diamond-shaped rather than square, but I actually quite liked the look of that as it echoes the elongated shape of the pear. To round it all off I added three tiny orange stitches at the bottom, to balance the stalk at the top, and then it was time to photograph the finished fruit. It always amazes me what a difference lighting makes! In this case direct sunlight (left) versus daylight without direct sun (right).

I’m not sure what will happen to this little pear; at the moment I just like looking at it . And my next stitching project? Little bits of this and that, for now. But although I am not stitching a lot, I am developing some ideas for when stitching bug, concentration and energy coincide again, and for one of them I have just ordered a couple of fabric samples – of shimmery, sheer organza. Now what could that become…?

Bush adventures

Posted on 16th February, 2023 by Flights of Fancy

Mr Mabel had for some time been encouraging me to book more Certificate classes, because, he said, it would get me back into things. Possibly. But the thought of actually having to make decisions about my Canvaswork filled me with dread. Still, a cautious look at the last photograph I’d taken of the project showed me that there were one or two things I could do on there which had already been mapped out so I could just sit down and stitch them.

What could be less challenging or threatening? So I framed up a new doodle cloth, booked a class, went there (for the first time taking my Lowery stand, which was a very good idea) and got ready to Stitch A Bush. Tutor Helen M, however, had other ideas.

She agreed that I could stitch that particular bush at this stage of the project (you may remember that the order in which the various segments are stitched is very important, and if anything had been in front of this bush it would have been a no-no) but wanted me to do something else first. She wanted me to make decisions about the background, more specifically the very very dark blobs in between the flowers and prominent leaves.

Now one of the benefits of having different tutors is that you get several different perspectives on your project; but one of the drawbacks is that those perspectives sometimes differ confusingly. In my last class back in June (about which a little more later on) Angela had told me to concentrate on a few big leaves and make all the rest a sort of textured jumble, an approach also suggested by Helen J. Helen M seemed to favour more individual leaves, and more stitch size grading in the background. Still, to benefit by your tutor’s experience you have to take their ideas on board, so I drew a slice of design with lots of leaves and dark patches onto my doodle cloth and set about filling in a few big leaves.

But not quite yet… I really felt I needed my non-challenging bush first, to get myself re-acclimatised. So I put together a blend of two different shades of Heathway Milano crewel wool, one strand of vintage Pearsall’s silk (inherited from MIL), one strand of House of Embroidery flat silk, and one unidentified variegated green sort-of-perle-#8 and worked my first canvaswork stitch since last June.

This was followed by more – a lot more – Turkey rug stitches in a total of four blends until the entire bush had been filled, right up into the holes occupied by the adjacent shed’s roof because, Helen said, the assessors will push stitches aside to check that no bare canvas threads are showing.

Good luck to them I say .

When I first planned these bushes I envisaged them just in crewel wool, but Angela suggested adding some other textures. I sampled them with added Pearsall’s silk and anonymous thread and that looked quite effective in the loop stage, but unfortunately was pretty much lost when trimmed (see images below). I really wanted to trim this bush and see the result of using three different additional threads, but I vaguely remembered a tutor telling a student who’d used Turkey rug on her Jacobean project that it should be cut right at the end. I checked with Helen and she confirmed this; apparently it has to do with keeping it stable while stitching around it is happening. So I won’t know whether my blending has been successful until the piece is finished – not ideal as I won’t be able to change anything about it then, but there it is.

The trimmed bushes don't show the non-wool threads well

By the way, before we get to my background sampling, those with eagle eyes and long memories may have noticed that there are a few bits on my overview picture above that weren’t on the overview picture I posted last June. That is because there was one more class after that post and I never wrote about it. The main things that happened there were a bud, some stems and an orange tulip, plus a lot of sampling. For the big round bud in the foreground I’d decided on Norwich stitch, which when I sampled it was too square, and not blended enough. Instead of more sampling I made the changes directly on the proper canvas, and I’m happy with the result – like so much in canvaswork it’s not exactly photorealistic, but I think it captures the idea of it.

Several of the big stems were very dark with a hint of red, and I worked those in blended brick stitch; the stem for the big elongated bud on the left was just green, so I went for long satin stitches. So long, in fact, that I may take a very fine, very sharp needle horizontally through them with an invisible thread to secure them in the middle. And then there was a small and very bright orange tulip for which I had just the right bright orange flat silk! That one was done in satin stitch with the line between petals indicated by a break in the stitches.

Before that class I had also sampled some Rococo and modified Leviathan stitches in plain and blended pinks as possible small tulips, some leaf shapes in fly and Cretan stitch and some upright crosses in Caron Watercolours Blackwatch blended with very dark blue and very dark green stranded cotton for the dark background bits; I sampled this both in isolation and against one of the sampled buds, to see if it could accommodate the curves. As you can see, a tiny bit of canvas is showing, so that needed work.

Modified Leviathan stitch for small tulips

Upright cross, in just that blend, was what I intended to sample at last Saturday’s class, but first there needed to be some leaves to surround the dark background bits. The first one I did in Madeira stranded silk, simply because colourwise that was the closest thing I had in my box of threads and because the leaves are quite smoothly textured, so silk seemed a good idea. I worked it in vertical and horizontal satin stitch, and bearing in mind Helen’s comment about not showing any canvas I tried tucking the horizontal stitches behind the vertical ones. Well, I tried it after not doing it for the first two stitches (blue arrow), and I decided not to redo those as they serve to illustrate the difference in look. I liked the look of both the silk and the tucking in so much that I will do this leaf the same way on the proper canvas.

Another leaf was done in diagonal satin stitch in double perle #8. I like the effect but the second green was too light; in spite of the 40 shades of green in my project boxes I couldn’t find a more suitable one, but fortunately I did find one in my stash back home for the real thing. The background of upright crosses worked well here, and hugged the leaf without any canvas showing. Result!

Oh, one thing I only noticed as I was stitching the sample was the light green little irregular triangle at the bottom (orange arrow; actually part of a larger leaf that got cut off in the photograph). As I had a lighter thread in my needle I doodled a tiny modified Amadeus stitch (blue arrow), and I liked it so much that it will definitely make it onto the proper canvas.

Another possible background texture which I’d sampled before, albeit in lighter colours, was staggered crosses.

Helen liked this one very much because the diagonal crosses in it are just a little bigger than the upright crosses, so my homework is to sample a background of staggered crosses in the bottom third, upright cross in the middle third, and something smaller in the top third; for that I will probably go with something called Lazy Kalem (orange arrow), one more stitch which reinforces my belief that in canvaswork any and every variation or combination gets its own name, as it’s basically tent stitch in mirrored vertical rows.

And that’s where I am now; the actual piece is not that much different, having gained one small bush, but it’s got me back into it so with a bit of luck there will be more progress in the not too distant future!

PS The plan for the next few months was to write just some quick, short FoFs. I’m a failure.

Mabel is back! (-ish…)

Posted on 1st February, 2023 by Flights of Fancy

Uhm, hello. Belated happy new year.

Yes, I’m still around. Long Covid (getting better but not quite there yet) and Life In General have kept me from doing much stitching, or writing FoFs. The ideas are there in both cases, but the inclination and energy are missing.

Still, some short FoFs should be manageable! And after such a long silence, there is plenty to tell you, even if a lot of it is stash rather than stitching (but fortunately very few needleworkers object to talking or reading about stash), or stitching that was done a while ago. So over the next few weeks and months I hope to tell you about Bayeux peacocks, goldwork classes, inexplicable damage to an embroidery, trees, silk fabric, and my return to the Canvaswork module of the RSN Certificate, among other things. It’s good to be back!

Cards, kits and a bit of stitching

Posted on 2nd November, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

You know how sometimes you run out of lots of things simultaneously? It was rather like that with the Figworthy stash collection. Not so much the personal stash, but the bits and pieces needed for our kits. And so lots of parcels have been making their way to our door, some useful but not particularly exciting (like stacks of foldable postal boxes) and some rather more colourful – like these aperture cards, some for as yet non-existent kits!

Cards for No Place Like Home and Wildflower kits

Cards for Butterfly Wreath, Quatrefoil and Goldwork kits

Cards for Christmas Wreath and new Owl kits

And then there was a new venture; as we’re changing ever more of our kits over from plastic grip seal bags to sturdy, recycleable cardboard boxes, they are no longer easily identifiable from the outside. Enter these rather pretty labels! I was very pleased with them, but less so with the supplier’s packaging – 650 smallish stickers do not need to be sent in 12 separate boxes. I’ve contacted them about this and hope to make them see that adding unnecessarily to their products’ carbon footprint won’t endear them to customers trying not to put too great a burden on the environment.

More kits now come in sturdy, recyclable boxes

In between getting our stock of kits back up I’ve also been putting together kits for the 6-week silverwork course that starts in Rugby this week. It’s surprising what a lot of bits you need for one not overly large umbrella! There’s the silk dupion, ironed and with the design transferred onto it (1) plus backing fabric, then felt for padding (2) and appliqué fabric ready-backed with Bondaweb (3), tracing paper for templates and a square of silk plus backing for doodling (4), sewing thread in several colours and a piece of beeswax (5), needles and a small velvet board (6), kid leather, pearl purl, milliary, check thread and spangles (7), smooth purl, bright check and wire check (8), Jap and smooth passing no. 4 and no. 6 (9) and some sadi metals for practising with (10). By the way, the sewing thread in the colour of the fabric is for oversewing plunged ends on the back of the work – that way, if you inadvertently sew through both layers it is much less likely to be visible than if you use the grey or yellow couching thread!

Materials for the Umbrella silverwork course

Materials and instructions ready for boxing

One lady asked whether she could possibly do the project in gold. I pointed out that it would still be the umbrella as I couldn’t teach two different designs, but she didn’t mind that so I rummaged in my cardboard tube of silk dupion and found a lovely burgundy piece. Unlike the turquoise silk it is handwoven (with some slubs) rather than powerwoven (smoother), which will make a very nice teaching point as the class can compare the two types of fabric side by side. The bit of turquoise in the picture is her doodle cloth which is the same as the others’.

And finally: I did some stitching! At embroidery group last Monday and this morning in the waiting room of the eye clinic where I was due for a check-up. It’s only a few autumnal swirls, but it’s as much as I did in the previous three months. Oh, and the doctor was pleased with the state of my eyes and signed me off – unless there are new symptoms, I don’t need to come back. Good news all round .

Sharing the love of stitch

Posted on 12th October, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

George Bernard Shaw famously said that those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach. And although I wouldn’t go so far as to say that I can’t stitch, the plain fact is that at the moment I don’t, so last week it was rather a treat to at least be able to teach!

Yes, it was the Knitting & Stitching Show, and although unfortunately I was unable to teach James the Snail, the Little Wildflower Garden workshop went ahead as planned. Well, almost as planned – the tail end of the railway strike combined with the workshops being moved to the far end of Alexandra Palace meant that several morning classes were a few attendees short. But those who were there enjoyed themselves and made great progress with their freestyle gardens.

Apart from teaching, did I acquire any stash at the show? Well, a few things: some pearl purl and coloured rough purl for kits, turquoise silk dupion and silver kid for the metalwork course I’m teaching in November, and some bottle green silk just because I liked the look of it – every show needs one impulse buy, don’t you think?

But even more fun than the stash were the people! Such as the American lady who got her times mixed up and arrived at the workshop 15 minutes before it ended, which led to her treating me to a cup of tea during which we had a quick one-on-one workshop and a lovely chat about (among other things) wine tasting, being an ex-pat, and Flanders & Swann; and Marlous, my fellow Dutchwoman and RSN student also known as the Stitching Sheep, with whom I caught up while she was helping out at the Golden Hinde stand.

And then there was the RSN stand. They are celebrating their 150th anniversary this year, and one of the things they used to entice people into the weird and wonderful world of embroidery was a big anniversary design set up on a slate frame. Future Tutors took it in turns to work on it, and members of the public could sit down and add a few stitches themselves. As I was chatting to the Future Tutor on duty, a lady looked at the embroidery and said “oh, I could never do that!” A short conversation elicited the fact that she did cross stitch and had also mastered French knots and blanket stitch, so we encouraged her to sit down with me and we stitched together. 10 minutes later she knew how to do detached buttonhole stitch to make a frilly edge. Result !

Another way of sharing the love of stitch is through my kits. It is my firm belief that anyone can stitch if they can just be persuaded to Have A Go. I try to make the instructions as detailed and complete as possible so that it does’t matter whether you’ve done Hardanger or freestyle or Shisha or goldwork before, if you methodically work your way through the instructions you will create something to be proud of. And although the contents of the kits are, to some extent, more important than the looks, I want my kits to be something to be proud of too! So one by one I am turning the loose-leaf instructions into neat booklets, and more and more of the kits will come in a useful (and recycleable) box rather than a plastic grip seal bag, as the Goldwork, Appliqué and Quatrefoil kits already do.

But whatever form the instructions take, one thing remains the same: a lot of measuring, cutting and ironing of fabric. I didn’t count them all, but including the backing fabrics I must have ironed well over 170 squares last night while watching an André Rieu concert (makes for very rhythmic ironing…)

The only other news at the moment is that I have decided to temporarily pause my RSN Certificate. What with a course to teach, and other stitching obligations in the next few months as well as our main business, I simply haven’t got the energy to give it my full attention – and it definitely needs that. So I have cancelled the classes I had booked, and I must say that has considerably reduced my feelings of stress. Who knows, I may even pick up some stitching just for enjoyment!

When there is no itch to stitch

Posted on 25th September, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it! I’m afraid Covid hit me rather harder than I’d ever expected, and I can think of no better illustration of this than my embroidery progress since the virus struck the Figworthy household in the last week of July. In those eight-and-a-half weeks I’ve picked up a needle twice. No, wait – I did a little bit of mending as well, so make that three times. You may remember the little tree with its modified satin stitch trunk which was my project back then. Here it is with the sum total of my progress in August and September (both bits done, incidentally, at the monthly Cake & Craft meeting which we organise at our church, and to which you are very welcome should you find yourself in the Rugby area on the third Friday of the month).

And even that little progress includes a fudge because in the second orange stem stitch I left the loop on the wrong side of the needle when coming up, and I didn’t notice it until later. Definitely not the time to try anything complicated!

So I’ve had to get my stitching excitement, such as it is, from other sources. One was a book on Japanese silk embroidery which I found, completely unexpectedly, in the most wonderful second-hand bookshop in Lyme Regis. Years ago I did a taster workshop at the Ally Pally Knitting & Stitching Show (before I started teaching there myself), and it quickly became clear to me that it is not my cup of tea (green or otherwise). It is a beautiful technique, and I’ve been looking in awe and admiration at some of the work done by fellow members of the Mary Corbet Facebook group, but I have no desire whatever to have another go myself. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy reading about it and gazing at the illustrations, finding more and more details to marvel at; three pounds well spent indeed.

Somewhere in those barren two months there was also some designing done, albeit in a very embryonic way. A couple of years ago I took the most serendipitous photograph of a jewel-like dragonfly in the sensory garden in Hunstanton, a split second before it flew off. From the start it felt like an embroidery waiting to happen, but I couldn’t quite work out how to capture it in thread – my needlepainting, the obvious technique, is by no means good enough to do it justice.

But then one day, as I was sitting there not stitching and with no inclination to stitch, I happened upon a post by Lizzy Pye of Laurelin Embroidery showing an or nué beetle in progress. And I thought, why not an or nué dragonfly? It would have to be stylised, but the metal background would give that lovely shimmer to it that I’d been hoping to get. And bit by bit ideas piled up. Or nué, as the “or” part of the name suggests, is worked on a background of gold passing or Jap; but that didn’t really fit with my idea of the dragonfly. Very well then, use a silver background; argent nué, to coin a phrase, with silk for the body and something metallic and sparkly and very fine for the wings. They would form the “nué” part of the name, which translates literally as “clouded”, and refers to the picture “clouding” the gold background, achieved by means of coloured couching threads fully covering the metal foundation threads. It is related to, but not quite the same as Italian couching, where the density of coloured couching creates shading but not an image; I used that technique in the bling version of the Tree of Life.

So far this mythical dragonfly exists only on paper and in my head, but I look forward to experimenting with various weights of passing and a variety of couching threads when I feel up to embroidering again.

A rather more practical stitch-related achievement was finally getting the fabric printed for some of my kits! Yes, I now have beautifully printed outlines for both the Little Wildflower Garden and the as yet unkitted mini Hope rainbow. Now they just need to be accurately cut into squares and ironed…

One of the downsides of this whole annoying long Covid thing is that I had to ask the Knitting & Stitching Show organisers to cancel my James the Jacobean Snail workshop. As I have never taught him before, there was just too much preparation still to be done, and where normally two months would have been ample for that, at the moment it is simply not doable. But if you were one of the people looking forward to having a go at James, or if you were disappointed because you couldn’t come to the workshop as it was on the wrong continent or at the wrong time, good news – it’ll be a little while, but James will have his moment of glory and be out there for all embroidering snail enthusiasts to stitch. I’ll keep you informed!

There, that was quite enough activity for today; a nap curled up with a nice warm pussycat is called for I think. But although it may be some time before the next update, and there may not be much stitching in that, I’ll try not to let another two months pass before the next FoF.

Of cars and Covid and no stitching

Posted on 30th July, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

We had a lovely week away at the Austin Seven Centenary Event (over a thousand Austin Sevens dating from 1922 to 1939 with their dedicated owners). As usual I brought some stitching, three varied projects, and as so often happens they never made it out of the stitching bag; there was far too much to do, including an outing with all the family and all the family cars. We were really pleased about that as we’ve never managed to get them all together before!

Then we got home and perhaps not surprisingly after such an event (although most of it took place in the open air) Mr F and I both came down with Covid. Praise God we’ve both been fully jabbed, but even so it is Not Nice. My most physically and intellectually challenging activity at the moment is reading detective novels I’ve read before so it doesn’t matter if I miss something.

So has there been no stitching at all? Well, I did manage a little something in the couple of days between returning and succumbing; it’s a new project I’m quite excited about and I’ll report on it in more detail in a future FoF when I feel human again. For now here is a modified satin stitch trunk in Danish Blomstergarn:

Bits for kits

Posted on 17th July, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

We’ve been rather busy lately with various things, among them preparing for the Austin Seven Centenary (the inspiration for the Bayeux Austins), and stitching has been thin on the ground. Still, life has not been a completely embroidery-free zone – that would never do!

One of the things I’ve been working on is getting fabrics printed for kits. A little over two years ago I mentioned this, said “watch this space”, and then forgot to write anything about it until a year later, when I discussed the three samples I’d had printed. Another year passed and I still hadn’t done anything with the samples (Whoo Me on organic calico, the Little Wildflower Garden on plain cotton, and Forever Frosty on Duchesse satin). Well, that’s not quite true. I’ve ironed them…

I was pleased with how they had turned out but there was the question of size. The fabric is 140cm wide, so it would be really convenient if I could print 14cm squares; but I usually cut the kit fabric to about 15cm, as I like to make sure there is enough to use comfortably with a 4″ hoop. I cut Whoo Me to size and tried it. Fortunately it works.

One of the things I hadn’t thought through properly before getting the samples printed was the design lines. These need to be black and relatively thick when I’m printing paper templates for transfers using the lightbox, but they look far too stark on the fabric – any lines not completely covered in stitching would show up quite clearly. More samples were needed, with grey lines this time. I went for a Butterfly Wreath on calico, another Wildflower garden (with a slightly darker background) on plain cotton, and as an experiment a small Hope rainbow with design lines in white on a printed denim background.

The grey lines definitely looked much better than the stark black – that is obviously the way to go. But there were two snags, one of my own making, one not. The one of my own making was the denim background. As I described in the previous fabric sample FoF, the fabrics are all either natural or white so any background colour has to be printed as well. I had photographed the fabric I’ve been using for the mini Hopes and used that as a background, but clearly the lighting had not been equal across the fabric when I took the picture – you can see that the bottom of the square is much darker than the top. The other snag was this:

There must have been something on the fabric, a little bit of loose fibre perhaps, which took the dye and then came off. It’s not a large fleck of white, but it is noticeable, and I would not be able to use this fabric in a kit. I wrote to the company to ask how common an occurrence this was; after all, if it happens once on a printed metre I could just use that square for demonstration purposes. But if it is more likely and I’d have to discard several squares, the average coast of the usable squares would get rather too high. They wrote back and explained that it was more likely to occur on some fabrics than others, and suggested a different fabric. So now another set of samples is being printed. Another Wildflower Garden with yet another slightly different background blue, a Hope rainbow using a new denim photograph as a background, and (because they had a 3-for-2 offer on swatches) a Shisha Tile on printed light yellow, all on this recommended fabric. I can’t show you the result yet, but below are small versions of the files they will be printed from. I’m looking forward to seeing how they turn out.

Another development I am considering for our range of kits is to present all of them in boxes. At the moment it is only the Goldwork Flowers & Bee, the Quatrefoil and the appliqué Mug That Cheers which come in a box; all the others come in a grip seal bag. These are lighter to send, but not as sturdy. However, as I will need to completely redesign the layout of the instructions (in booklet form rather than on loose A4 pages) this will have to wait until time is not in quite such short supply. But I’m excited about getting our kits to look their very best !

A sticky finish and a chaotic start

Posted on 2nd July, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

Last month I stitched a few rainbows with the excuse that they might become kits but really just because I like stitching these colourful little things and they’re a good opportunity to play with lovely silks . And although “What are you going to do with it?” is The Question That Must Not Be Asked, I do occasionally try and think of ways to finish bits of embroidery. For small designs like these that’s often cards or coasters. Well, with that frilly cloud there was no way it was going to fit into a coaster, and I didn’t want to do another card (I’m a bit low on aperture cards and I haven’t got round to reordering them), so I went for that other staple of embroidery finishes, an ornament.

Now there are people who create the most beautiful flatfolds, pincushions, stuffed ornaments and scissor fobs without breaking a sweat (Vonna Pfeiffer of the Twisted Stitcher springs to mind), but I know that my skills do not lie in that area. The closest I got was this Frosty Pine ornament, and even that should not be looked at too closely…

I do get on rather well with flexi-hoop framing! Felt backing, card backing, foam backing, or even no backing at all still make for a presentable front. But I’ve done a fair few of those, and I wanted to do something different. And then I remembered some 4″ bamboo hoops I bought for kits, thinking they came from the UK (search for UK-only items, seller marked as a UK seller, location of items something like Northampton). They didn’t. They arrived with Chinese customs labels all over the parcel. And they weren’t very good. Heigh-ho, chalk it up to experience, but after several of the outer hoops had snapped I was left with some inner hoops, i.e. bamboo rings. Could I perhaps do something with one of those?

Normally when you use a hoop to finish a piece of embroidery you clamp the fabric between the inner and outer hoop. That was obviously not going to work here. So what about glue? I tend not to like getting glue anywhere near my stitching, but as I was just experimenting I decided to give it a go. Draw a circle around the design on the back of the fabric using the bamboo ring, cut with an allowance of about twice the depth of the ring, glue the outside of the ring and pull the fabric taut over it, glue the inside of the ring and stick the excess fabric to it. So far so good, although I could have done with a little more fabric in places.

A little more fabric would have been good...

I could have left it like that and told anyone who looked at it not to pick it up and turn it over, but I decided to go for something a bit neater. Some nice thick wadding to give a bit of body to what is quite a thin fabric (if I used it in a kit I would definitely have supplied backing fabric to support the stitching), and then a circle of craft foam. Brown because that’s what I happened to have; not the most attractive look, but it’ll do. Using my trusty pointy scissors I trimmed the edges of the foam (aiming for a chamfer – not sure I quite got it) so it wouldn’t be visible from the front, and that was that.

The result is a little rustic looking, but I like it! It’s relatively quick and simple, if a bit messy if like me you tend to get glue everywhere, and as there is no frame it allows the embroidery to stand on its own and speak for itself. (Stand on its own metaphorically, of course; if you want it to stand up in the literal sense as well you’d have to glue some sort of prop to the back.)

Talking of rustic-looking projects, last Monday I had to go back to the hospital to have my eyes checked – good news fortunately, no retinal tears and just the advice to monitor but not worry – and although I had been assured that with an 8.30am appointment I’d be “in and out” I felt it might be a good idea to bring something to occupy me. As they were going to put those drops into my eyes that blur your vision a book or magazine wasn’t going to be much good. So I went for some embroidery.

Yes, yes, I know – bear with me . Reading very close up without my glasses is not really something I can do comfortably for any length of time, but I have often done close-up embroidery unbespectacled. And even with drops that should be possible. Nothing too precise, of course. But I was reminded of that hymn I quoted last time, and could see a project emerging; “Let there be” in light silk, and “LIGHT” in gold ribbon couched over the top of the words “chaos” and “darkness” in black silk, on a heavy denim background. It felt rather apt to be stitching black chaos and darkness while waiting to hear the verdict on my eyes, and by their very nature it wouldn’t matter if these words looked a bit rough! As it happens the wait wasn’t quite as long as I had feared (I was seen in a little over an hour), and the blurring did get too bad after a while to stitch, but I managed “chaos” plus the “ne” of darkness. And they didn’t come out too ragged after all.

I don’t know when I’m going to finish this – I’m not even sure if I will finish it. But it has served its purpose: while I was anxious it reminded me of the One who made the light, who made my eyes, and who holds me in His hands whatever happens.

Flights of Fancy

Mabel's musings on anything stitchy

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