Stitching: The Next Generation

Posted on 3rd January, 2025 by Flights of Fancy

A Happy New Year to you all! And what better way to start a new year than by getting young people stitching? Last November/December I taught a metalwork embroidery course in Rugby, and for the first class I designed a small project to familiarise the (grown-up) students with the basic techniques of couching, plunging, chipping and attaching spangles. That went very well, with all of them creating a very personal version of the little copper heart within the 2-hour class time (although some of them added some finishing touches at a later date). I was seriously impressed with them!

By then I had worked a couple of variations myself, one in copper like the students (see if you can spot where I missed a stitch…) and one in silver, and I was inspired to re-invent the little heart as a stand-alone project. I called it Precious Heart, and envisaged it as a combination of the original copper with silver and gold spangles. To me it would be a representation of the Trinity, with the reddish copper standing for the sacrifice of Jesus, the silver for the Holy Spirit and the gold for God who is King as well as Father. That version exists only on paper as yet, but I hope to stitch it soon.

Precious Heart in copper on ivory faux suede

Precious Heart in silver on grey ultrasuede

Incidentally, stitching the first model I used a different colour sewing thread from the one I normally use with copper metals, because Sarah de Rousset-Hall had told me at the Knitting & Stitching Show that she always used brown rather than orange with copper, and saying that Sarah knows her goldwork is a bit of an understatement! Off to the Barnyarns stand I went to get a reel of brown Gutermann Sew All thread, but I wasn’t absolutely sure I liked it. Another Sarah, whose Golden Hinde stand was nearby, lent me some copper passing to take to the Barnyarns stand, where the gentleman in charge helped me match various Gutermann browns, oranges and coppers to the metal thread (really, stitchy people are too kind for words). I ended up purchasing Sarah de R-H’s brown plus a more chestnutty colour, and after using Sarah’s brown for the heart I worked a little couching experiment where the three different thread colours were used close together for comparison. The result? I prefer the chestnutty brown (middle) to both Sarah’s brown (closest to the heart) and my original orange (outer edge), so that’s what I’ll use in future.

You may wonder if I’m ever going to get to the young people I mentioned. Yes I am – it’s time to introduce you to my three guinea pigs! You see, as my adult students did so well completing the heart within two hours, I thought that besides turning it into a kit I might be able to offer it as a workshop at the Knitting & Stitching Show. The form for submitting workshops has a tick box to say whether they are suitable for children/young people, and I will only tick that box if a workshop has been tried out on one or more stitchers of tender years. Rather frighteningly my original guinea pig is now in her 20s, so I needed some new victims! I found them in three brave youngsters from our church, a 12-year-old (and her 37-year-old mother who was also interested in trying out metalwork embroidery), a 13-year-old (for whom I stitched a lockdown birthday card when she was 9) and her 10-year-old brother (the recipient of Septimus the Septopus). Time to get all my materials together – always an exciting part of workshop preparations! Halfway through those preparations the resident feline took up her position as well, ready to oversee proceedings.

Everyone was given a piece of faux suede with the design drawn on, hooped up with backing fabric; sewing thread in three colours; a little velvet board; copper passing, bright check and wire check; and gold and silver spangles. There were also two non-goldwork bits: a piece of faux leather and a pair of magnets, for those who wished to turn their little heart into a brooch (as modelled here by Mr Mabel).

We started with a quick run-through of what we were going to do, and they all had a chance to take a closer look at the two models. By this time my boy guinea pig was beginning to look a little worried, but fortunately the middle girl reminded him (which I had meant to start by doing, but forgot) that this was a workshop to find out whether it was suitable for children their age, and that therefore it didn’t matter if they couldn’t do it. I couldn’t have put it better myself. Having been thus reassured, they set to their task undaunted (well, mildly daunted at most) and with fierce concentration. Needles unthreaded themselves, a few spangles made a bid for freedom, and some wire check got stretched before I could say “be careful not to stre… ah.” No matter, they were doing metalwork embroidery, and doing it very well!

When setting an age limit for my workshops I tend to say “suitable for children 12 years and older”, which meant it was always going to be challenging for the 10-year-old guinea pig, and he did occasionally get a bit frustrated, saying, “I’m so bad at this” – but he cheered up when I told him that in the Middle Ages people would have to go through a 7-year apprenticeship to learn goldwork, and here he was doing jolly well after about an hour and a half of tuition .

Now I’m sure you’d like to see what they produced! And I wish I had better pictures to show you; but I’d left my camera on the wrong setting, so they are all rather blurry. Still, they do show that each of them made their little heart their own. They all worked the passing outline, after which I showed them how to do chipping and attach spangles and told them to go and do whatever they liked – and this is what they liked:

They were all very proud of what they had achieved, and rightly so; I think we have established that the workshop is suitable for children, especially brilliant ones like my three guinea pigs!

A golden snowdrop

Posted on 18th September, 2024 by Flights of Fancy

Last week I finished (in both senses of the word – finished stitching and made up) a project which unfortunately I can’t tell you about yet because it’s been commissioned. But I was mightily pleased and relieved that it was done! So did I then rush back to my Canvaswork, in preparation for Saturday’s class? Uhm, no. It was quite a productive class (more about that in a future FoF), but I had to warn Kathryn the tutor that I had done very little homework and wouldn’t be able to do much for October’s class either. Instead the week was taken up with ordering supplies (cards and envelopes for kits, threads, printed fabrics), gathering materials and setting up one of the three models to be stitched for the Goldwork With Colour course I’m teaching at Rugby’s Percival Guildhouse later this year. (Yes, I am very late. Don’t rub it in. Panic is definitely hovering in the wings.)

The final project in the course (which I can therefore ignore for now) is a peacock, and will use lots of coloured metals and leather, some of which you can see in the box of bling above. It is intended to offer the students the opportunity to create their own version of the design by deciding which materials and techniques to use for the various parts of the peacock. But apart from a small warm-up project that doesn’t need a stitched model (unless I have time to spare) the students will start with one of a pair of or nué designs, choosing a snowdrop on gold or a forget-me-not on silver. I suppose the latter should really be called argent nué, but the term goldwork tends to cover anything metallic so we’ll stick with that. Or nué doesn’t take much in the way of materials: fabric, Jap or smooth passing (I’m using the latter in size no. 6), sewing thread to match the metal, and stranded cotton in whatever colours you need for your picture.

But what is or nué? It is a technique in which metal threads are couched down to completely fill a shape, but using a variety of colours rather than just the usual matching thread – in other words, instead of making the couching as near-invisible as possible, some of it stands out from the gold background to form a picture. Only on that part of the gold which surrounds the picture is the metal couched with the usual golden-yellow sewing thread (or grey in the case of silver threads), in the usual bricked pattern of couching stitches about 3mm apart. The coloured couching is more dense, completely covering the metal threads. There is a related technique sometimes called Italian couching where shading is achieved by working the coloured stitches wider apart or closer together, but in or nué it is done by colour changes rather than variations in stitch density. It is possible to have quite sophisticated shading in an or nué design (some of the medieval examples are stunningly detailed), but often it uses a fairly simple palette in blocks of colour. I decided to keep the shading simple, as it will be the students’ first-ever attempt at this technique. And keeping the shading simple is easier in a design without too much detail. So my first step was to create a relatively simple outline of a snowdrop.

Traditionally or nué is worked with the gold couched down in horizontal lines, but in modern pieces it is sometimes worked in a spiral. In order to present students with both options, I decided early on that the snowdrop would be couched horizontally, and the forget-me-not in a spiral. Now provided you start exactly in the centre, the spiral will more or less automatically form a circle; but keeping the horizontal threads horizontal, especially if you don’t start in the middle of the design and you’ve foolishly decided on an oval shape rather than the traditional rectangle, can be trickier. Fortunately, as the fabric will be covered completely it isn’t a problem to add guidelines. As for knowing when to use which colour couching thread, it is possible to have just the outline on the fabric and refer to an external colour picture, or to put coloured dots in the various blocks, but I chose to use colouring pencils to fill in the design. It doesn’t have to be beautiful, the shades don’t even have to match your thread colours closely – it just serves to show which colour goes where.

The design coloured in to help with the shading

Another option is to print the colour picture onto the fabric, and I have in fact ordered printed versions of these two designs. It will be interesting to compare working this technique on two different fabrics – the one I chose for printing is a heavier weight than the one used above – and it will also give me the opportunity (time permitting…) to work the oval design in two ways: starting from the bottom with a pinched start (more of that below), or starting in the middle and working first one half and then the other. With the latter method it will be easier to keep the couched threads horizontal, but because you always work the couching stitches towards the previous line of metal thread it would mean stitching the top half differently from the bottom half. If I do get round to trying it that way I will report back!

For now I was ready to get the snowdrop hooped up, always an exciting moment as it signals the shift from designing and material gathering to actual stitching! It wasn’t until after I’d placed the fabric in the hoop in my usual way (screw at the top) that I realised I wanted to clamp the hoop in my Lowery stand so that the stand faced me, rather than having it by my side. So I rearranged the fabric, clamped it and started by fastening on the golden yellow thread and the first three colours, three shades of green. Because the picture is built up in lines rather than in blocks of colour, it is convenient to have needles with all the necessary colours on the go at the same time (another argument for a limited colour palette ). Needles with white and grey thread will be added once I get further up the design.

The hoop shifted, and the first colours fastened on

And then there is the gold thread. Because passing is practically always couched in pairs, you either have to have two reels from which you unwind the passing simultaneously, or if you have just one reel, you have to decide beforehand how much you are likely to need and cut two single lengths or one double length. I decided on the latter, partly because having two reels of passing attached to your stitching is quite cumbersome, and partly because I want to use a pinched start: double the thread, pinch it to make a sharp crease, couch it down with a single stitch over the crease, and then continue couching over the pair (shown below with Jap thread). It saves on plunging and oversewing, always a good thing in my book.

A single stitch over the crease of the doubled metal thread

But how much would I need? I won’t bother you with my scribbled calculations of the width of a pair of passing, how many pairs would fill the shape, and how wide the lines would be on average along the oval, but it worked out at about 6 metres. I cut 7 metres to be on the safe side, doubled it, and wound it onto an old wooden bobbin which Mr Mabel had cut some bits off to make sure it couldn’t roll away. One thing to remember when winding metal threads like these is to wind them by turning the bobbin while holding the thread still; this ensures that it doesn’t get twisted, which in turn stops the metal covering (wire or foil) from working loose from the thread core.

Incidentally, if you look up or nué online or in books you will generally see that every horizontal line is cut, couched and plunged separately; sometimes the amount of plunging and securing is reduced by using a pinched start and only plunging the end of the line, making sure that consecutive lines are worked in opposite directions so the pinched starts are on alternating sides of the shape. This is a perfectly legitimate approach, but it is not one I have chosen to follow. As I mentioned before, I’m not a fan of excessive plunging and oversewing, and I feel justified in trying to avoid it as much as I can by the fact that those medieval embroiderers who produced such beautiful work did too – gold thread was gold thread in those days, and very expensive; they weren’t going to waste a good part of it on the back of the work! Instead, they used the back and forth method, plunging only when the shape had been filled or their metal thread ran out. What’s good enough for them is good enough for me .

From colour to black & white

Posted on 1st April, 2024 by Flights of Fancy

Today is Easter Monday (or second Easter Day, as it is known in my native Dutch), and on Easter Monday 13 years ago Mabel Figworthy’s Fancies was born. Today is also April 1st, which happens to be Mabel’s own birthday (yes, really). So a very good day on which to get back to my unsuccessful new year’s resolutions and break this eleven-week-long spell of not writing any FoFs!

Although stitching has been a bit intermittent due to health and other issues, there has been some, and there has even been a finish – yes, Llandrindod has been completed, a mere five years and eleven months after it was first conceived. You may remember that last time I wrote I was weighing up the relative merits of outlining the gems in opalescent white, or in metallics matching the colour of the gems. Well, in the end I decided on both: the white stood out too much against the darker facets, but the coloured metallics (which are, in fact, Petite Treasure Braid, not blending filament as I thought) were rather too stark next to some of the lighter facets. So why not combine the two? Tested on the amethyst this turned out to be a proper Goldilocks solution – just right. So out came half of the coloured metallics on the other three, and in went the opalescent white.

Trying out a two-metallic solution on the amethyst

Finally I wanted to outline the gold parts in, well, gold. Elizabethan twist (a fine 2-ply) for the dark gold parts, a very fine passing for the light gold parts, with some decoration yet to be decided on the four light arcs. But when I’d finished couching the Elizabethan twist I found that I actually rather liked the effect of not having the lighter parts outlined – it made them recede so that the overall effect was more 3D. And any decoration I thought of (scrolls, spangles) just looked fussy. So after a few fill-in stitches where the silk didn’t quite meet the gold I declared Llandrindod finished; finally! I had hoped to mount it so that when we go to Wales for our annual rally later this month I could take it to the church that inspired it and show it to the vicar, but I haven’t got round to it. Oh well, there’s always next year!

My next project, although it also included bling, couldn’t be more different. Inspired by a penguin brooch in a goldwork book I recently acquired, I decided to make a brooch of my own, but I didn’t just want to follow the penguin project. However, I did want it to be silver on black. What other animals could I think of that were black and white, and that could be reduced to a fairly stylised version while still being recognisable? Having rejected cows, zebras and magpies, I went for a badger, or more accurately, a badger’s face. The first step was to study some photographs of badgers, and to try and capture its essence in as few lines as possible. Then to scribble down ideas for the various silver threads and wires to use. The fabric I had already decided on: the slightly fuzzy side of black faux suede. This meant the white parts would be covered in various types of silver, while the black parts would remain unstitched. But what about the eyes, which were black on black? For that I picked black Kreinik #5 Jap, to be couched in a spiral – my theory being that the shininess of the black Jap would give enough contrast against the matt suede to stand out.

I’d printed the badger outline in several sizes, some very big so I could sketch stitches in them, some smaller to use as templates. The penguin brooch was 5cm tall and that did seem to be about as big as you’d like a brooch to be, but I wasn’t sure if that would give enough room for the various types of silverwork I wanted to include. However, placing the wires and threads on the smallest template showed that it was feasible at 5cm, so I went ahead and transferred that version to the suede, using prick & pounce and a silver gel pen.

The first thing to be stitched was the lighter top of the nose, which would be done in kid leather. But the pewter leather I got was not quite dark enough. Fortunately I found some soft faux leather in just the right shade, and pretty much the exact shade of DMC to stitch it down with! Unfortunately, stitching on fuzzy black turns out to be very difficult to photograph, so my close-up of the finished nose highlight is too blurred to be usable. Never mind, you’ll see it in later overview pictures.

The next thing was all the outlines (everything except the nose), for which I picked Very Fine pearl purl (PP), the thinnest available. Having worked out a stitch order and, in the interest of reproducability, having measured all the bits of PP I cut, I got to work. This was a very satisfying part of the process because it stitches up relatively quickly, but my goodness it is hard on the eyes! Not something to try and finish in one go.

You may have noticed in the picture above that one eye has been stitched as well, couching black Kreinik Jap as intended. It’s fairly visible in the photograph but not nearly so much in real life, so I left the other eye to mull that one over for a bit. Mr Figworthy suggested an oval sequin, but if I was going to use anything like that in a metal thread embroidery piece I’d always use spangles, and they don’t come in oval shapes. Also, a badger’s eyes aren’t silver. But they are, of course, shiny – so what if I used a spangle and covered most of it in black couching thread, with just a bit of the silver shining through, and with perhaps a black outline to give shape to the eye? My first attempt covered the spangle too much, so that it became practically camouflaged. A second version, using eight couching stitches, worked better. Kreinik for the outline seemed a better idea than just black thread, and I did indeed like the effect. At some point I will unpick the first eye and re-do it in the same way.

First, however, I wanted to get started with the middle white stripe, in silver no. 7 passing couched in pairs. My initial sketch divided this into the stripe down to the nose, and the narrow bit underneath the nose with the roughly triangular bits beside it. But as there was a bit more room than I’d thought, I took the pair of passing threads all the way round the face; there is no room for another pair underneath the nose, so I will work a single one there that will extend into the adjacent triangles.

And that’s where I’ve got to. I should do some homework for my next Certificate class (a couple have been cancelled so I really can’t turn up after all that time with only half a leaf and a small tulip done) but I am rather taken with this badger and am reluctant to put him to one side. Also, he won’t be assessed so if anything doesn’t work it doesn’t matter… So I may take the cowardly option and stick with this blingy bit of black & white. At least I’m stitching, and FoFfing, which must be a good thing!

New year’s resolutions

Posted on 3rd January, 2024 by Flights of Fancy

Happy New Year

The fact that I am wishing you this on 3rd January tells you all you need to know about my success rate with new year’s resolutions. I had fully intended to get FoF back on track after its long hiatus on the first day of the year, but it didn’t happen. Oh well. Better late than never, as they say, and I hope to catch up on all the things that would normally have been posted in the dry spell between the end of last August and now, when instead life and Covid got in the way. This means some of it wont’t be as topical as it might have been, but fortunately goldwork materials, course pictures and Certificate updates don’t really have best before dates. So on with the show, and one resolution that I have kept!

It concerns what some would call UFOs but I prefer to think of as long-term WIPs. My resolution was, not necessarily to finish them, but at least to occasionally put some stitches in. Well, I didn’t want to be too ambitious. And rather to my own surprise, I have actually done some of this occasional stitching! One of the projects to benefit from this is Llandrindod. True, the difference between the progress picture taken in November 2021 and today’s picture is not massive, but it is noticeable – that must count towards the resolution score.

Another design you may remember is my quartet of Hannah Dunnet-inspired trees that became a trio because I simply couldn’t make one of the trees work. I had also got stuck on the third of the remaining trees, as the padded satin stitch used for the autumnal swirls in its foliage was not doing what I wanted it to do. After unpicking and restitching the red swirl twice I’d decided to leave it and work on things that were more fun. But as I was tidying my craft room I came across the trees and decided to have another go. And what do you know, it worked! The satin stitch slanted nicely around the curves, and I’m happy with the way it looks. Just the other three swirls to go, plus some green French knots in the background, and it will be a WIP no longer.

On the grounds that there is no absolute law which states that new year’s resolutions have to be onerous, I made my second resolution a very easy one to keep: improving my skills by practicing with new projects, and enjoying the process a lot! Although I haven’t put a stitch in yet, I have hooped up the fabric and set out the materials for this lovely RSN online goldwork & silk shading course which Mr Mabel gave me for Christmas. Just looking at it and handling the materials brings me great pleasure! I’m sure I will enjoy it as much as the box making course I did last year (an update on which is one of the FoFs-to-come).

I hope all your resolutions are pleasant ones, and that you will have a great time keeping them in 2024!

A blooming brooch

Posted on 29th August, 2023 by Flights of Fancy

Remember Esmee’s Unicorn? From the start I had ideas about using the pelmet-weight interfacing which it was stitched on for a couple of other, more or less experimental projects. One is a goldwork brooch, but as there are a few challenges there (the sturdier metals generally need plunging and cause a bulky back, the metals that conveniently stay completely on the front tend to be more fragile and prone to being squashed) I decided to leave that for now. But this material is also very suitable for introducing young ones to stitching: it’s stiff enough to stitch in hand without needing a hoop, if pre-pricked it can be stitched with a blunt needle, and it can be cut into shapes without fraying. So I started with a simple project that could be finished as a brooch or a fridge magnet (or, I suppose, a needle minder, except the stitching might get in the way).

The first thing was to pick a design; ideally one with bold, simple lines and not too many colours. Was there anything in my collection that would fit the bill? Yes there was – an as yet unstitched floral design based on a print by Vicky, my extremely talented niece-in-law-in-law (my husband is her husband’s uncle) who is artistically known as Woah There Pickle. The whole thing would be too big for this purpose, but I did once extract a single daisy from it to stitch as a birthday card for Vicky. What if I used that, slightly smaller, with only one pair of leaves, and done as a forget-me-not? Although for a children’s kit I’d probably use standard DMC, I figured that for this trial version I could use up some discontinued hand-dyed Carrie’s Creations threads, so I picked some suitable colours and set about tracing the flower.

Next up was pricking the design onto the interfacing. I varied the depth of the pricking to see what size holes I could make, and which size would be best. The jury’s out on that one; bigger holes make it easier to find them with the needle for inexperienced stitchers, but smaller ones can be closed up if you decide you want to put the stitch in a slightly different place. One thing is certain, if the intention is for the stitcher to use the existing holes they need to be pricked more accurately than I did here, as the evenness of the stitch length will be determined by the pricking.

The design outlined in holes on the interfacing

To add a bit of extra colour without having to do more stitching, I first lightly shaded the various parts using colouring pencils. I tried applying more pressure on a bit of spare interfacing to see if you could create brighter colours, and you can – good to know for future projects.

Picking pencil colours to go with the threads

A little colour added to the interfacing

My original idea was to do the whole thing in backstitch, on the grounds that that would be easier for young stitchers than stem stitch, and you can always add interest by whipping some of it. In fact you could make it even easier by using whipped running stitch. But I like the look of stem stitch, so for this model that’s what I went with. And as the model is experimental anyway, I even tried some split stitch and satin stitch. The former works fine, although if that is the intended stitch from the outset it would be better to put the holes a little closer together; satin stitch, however, is not ideal on this background. The stitches need to be very close together and in doing so you are in danger of creating a perforated line that will tear. Still, with plenty of strands in the needle that spread a bit, it doesn’t look too bad. Initially I meant to whip the petals, but it would be tricky in the sharp turns where the petals meet, so I confined whipping to the short lines inside the petals.

The stitching was finished – now for the final finishing! As with Esmee’s Unicorn I cut very closely around the stitching, and soon realised that youngsters will probably need some assistance with that; I’m fairly handy with my favourite small pointy scissors, but even so I managed to nick a stitch at the back, which threatened to unravel one of the leaves! PVA glue to the rescue. It is often dabbed around the edges of stumpwork before cutting, and in this case it did the job equally well afterwards.

Meanwhile I had ordered some very thin neodymium magnets, half of them adhesive and half of them plain, from a company Mr Figworthy uses for magnets to stick into sump drain plugs (as you do). When the glue on the flower had completely dried, I stuck one magnet to the back, and paired it with a non-sticky magnet, held apart by a sort of plastic washer that came with them which makes it easier to separate them.

The finished flower ready for magnetising

The arrangement of two magnets and a washer

And then it’s just a matter of placing the non-sticky magnet behind the fabric of your blouse or shirt or coat, and the flower on the outside, and hey presto, a brooch that doesn’t damage your clothes! Modelled here by Mr Figworthy, it proved easy to put on and take off, but strongly enough attached not to fall off when accidentally nudged. If you prefer to display it on your fridge just leave off the backing magnet.

What next with heavy-weight interfacing? You may remember that years ago our church used to organise an annual Christmas Craft Event at the local Junior school for the children in the village and the surrounding area. Unfortunately for various reasons we had to give up doing this, but now that we have our lovely new building we felt it might be time to revive the event. And wouldn’t this sort of stitching be just the thing? I’m going to have a little play with a Christmas angel based on some calligraphy I did back in the dark ages – made a bit more chunky, so he’ll be easier to cut out, and outline only, so he’s relatively quick to stitch. I’ll let you know how I get on!

Hengest gets company

Posted on 14th August, 2023 by Flights of Fancy

Once upon a time there was a dopey looking horse on a medieval cope who got turned into a dopey looking unicorn: Hengest. As he took about four and a half years from start to finish you would think he had abundantly scratched any unicorn itch I might have had. And then I came across some paper I bought in the Netherlands years ago for wrapping St Nicholas presents. It was covered in colourful cartoonish representations of the various people and things associated with that festival, among them St Nicholas’ horse. But I did not see a horse. I saw a unicorn. It’s what happens when you have recently become grandmother to a sweet baby girl. Your thoughts go pink and lilac and unicorny. And so I played around with this little horse, added a horn, rearranged his mane, tweaked his saddle blanket to have room for an initial, changed the colour palette from primary to pastel, and there was Esmee’s Unicorn!

But what to do with it? Well, babies use bibs. Why not find a nice plain white bib and unicornify it? Unfortunately our local supermarket had a wide array of coloured and pre-decorated bibs, but nothing plain and white. The closest thing I could find, tucked away on the last-season’s-things rail, was a small white broderie anglaise bib and cap. I’m not sure who thought it would be a good idea to make a baby’s bib out of broderie anglaise, and I seriously doubt that the person who decided on the size of it has ever fed a baby, but one has to work with what is available.

At first I considered stitching on the back of the bib, which is a plain fabric – it could then be used double-sided. It would mean very careful stitching, taking the needle in a sewing motion through one layer of fabric only, and fastening on and off would be tricky (although I had done something similar when embellishing the foot of a memory bear). More problematically, the colours would probably shine through to the front. I dismissed this approach. My next idea was to simply stitch over the broderie anglaise, but I worried that the unevenness of the fabric would make it difficult to keep the lines neat. A patch, then? And preferably something that doesn’t fray, so it doesn’t have to be hemmed or oversewn. I decided on some pelmet-weight non-woven interfacing which I originally bought for a stumpwork butterfly, then traced the design, pricked it, and poked a pencil through the holes to create a connect-the-dots unicorn. Pick the required shades of DMC, and we’re ready to go.

By the way, seeing the way my needle marked the interfacing I had a thought: it had been quite difficult to mark the dots with my mechanical pencil going through the holes in the pricked tracing paper, so why not just prick the tracing paper while it sits on top of the interfacing? A quick try showed that this was perfectly feasible, and if you prick with a bit of thought, placing the holes closer together on tight curves, you could actually use these holes for your stitches! In fact I might try this for a workshop or children’s kit – you could pre-prick a small design and let them create a brooch or a fridge magnet. The stitching could be done in hand, no need for a hoop as the fabric is so stiff.

The resulting dots, ready for connecting

I filed that little idea away and set to work on the unicorn. Fasten on with a knot at the front (pink arrow) and a few small stab stitches (blue arrow; neither of them very easy to see because I chose to photograph it while using light grey thread on a white background…) and then just stem stitch over all the lines – it was quite relaxing! The only bits which were not stem stitched were the nostril (satin stitch) and the eye (straight stitches with a doubled single strand fastened on with a loop start).

When the whole unicorn had been stitched it was time to attach him (her?) to the bib. First I cut around the outline of the unicorn, as close to the stitching as I dared. I didn’t cut the bit between the head and the blanket, as the background it would be stitched onto was white anyway; if the background had been a different colour, I would reluctantly have attempted to cut that part too. Then I backstitched around the outline using a polyester sewing thread, tucking the stitches underneath the stem stitches as much as possible. And here it is: one unicorned bib.

But even as I was getting things together for Esmee’s bib, somewhere in the goldwork-loving recesses of my mind an idea stirred. The sort of unicorns that appeal to little girls are, unlike woolly Hengest, sparkly and blingy. Should there be bling in Esmee’s unicorn? But no, a bib needs to be washable. Still, there is nothing to stop me from stitching a metalwork unicorn purely for my own enjoyment, right? There would be gold and silver passing, there might be shiny metallic kid leather for the blanket, there could be spangles…

Esmee's Unicorn with spangles on its blanket

Esmee's Unicorn with spangles and an initial

… and there could be colour! Although goldwork suggests, well, gold, and possibly silver and copper, modern metal embroidery materials come in all sorts of pretty shades. How is this for some unicorn-appropriate twist? And I’ve got the same colours in a thinner passing thread.

Still, although my stash of goldwork materials is fairly extensive (and about to become even more so – watch this space) I don’t have much in the way of coloured metallics for couching; no pink twist or passing, for example, and no coloured metallic kid either. So I paid a little visit to Sarah Homfray’s excellent shop and some colourful shiny goodies are making their way Figworthy-wards! We’ll soon be all set for a blingy unicorn .

Stitching an arboretum, and a cull

Posted on 18th June, 2023 by Flights of Fancy

Over the past six years or so our kitchen calendar has often been one by Hannah Dunnett, who combines paintings with Bible verses so organically that it is hard to say whether they are illustrated verses or paintings with lettering added. I have one of her posters in my craft room (Psalm 121, in case you’re wondering). Yes, I really like her work! Last year, some small trees on one of the calendar’s pages drew my attention. They reminded me of Psalm 1, which talks about the righteous being like trees planted by streams of water and bearing fruit. Their shapes were rather satisfying. Would they work in stitch, I wondered.

I decided they probably would, and first things first, contacted Hannah Dunnett to ask whether I could have a go at embroidering these trees as long as they were just for my own enjoyment, not for making into kits or chart packs. She thought that was a lovely idea and asked me to send pictures when I’d finished them. Permission having been obtained, the next step was to create usable outlines for transferring onto fabric. Some day I will start using a vector-based program, but getting to grips with one of those takes time, so until we retire from our main business I’m sticking with the photo editing program I’ve been using until now and which I know inside out.

Then it was a matter of choosing colours. For three of the trees I decided to stick more or less with the colours of the original, but the purply-red tree, having come from a different part of the design, didn’t quite fit in. From the start I envisaged it as an autumnal tree, with its green parts more towards the yellow end of the spectrum and some red, orange and yellow in it. As the green in the other trees leans more towards the blue end this meant that tree number four still didn’t completely match the rest of the set, but there – who says a designer needs to be consistent in everything .

Time to start stitching! Because these trees aren’t meant for anything other than my own pleasure this was a great opportunity to use lots of different threads from my stash, and to play with various stitches without too much planning. (I am constitutionally incapable of stitching without any planning at all, so there were some scribbled stitch ideas and notes on and around the printed outlines, but the process has been as unplanned as I can manage.) For fabric I chose a densely woven linen that needs no backing and allows for very precise stitch placement, and to begin with I picked Splendor silks for the apple tree and Heathway Milano wool for the autumnal one; later I added Caron threads for the tall tree (cypress? poplar?) and both coton à broder and floche for the fourth tree.

Linen fabric with the transferred designs and a start on the apple tree

The main focus of the apple tree is, unsurprisingly, the apples, and I wanted them to stand out. To give them a bit of height I worked them in Rhodes stitch, but the first one looked a little uneven so I unpicked it and from then on worked split stitch outlines before covering them in Rhodes stitch, which made them much neater. For the green surrounding the apples I had to decide on the look I was after; Hannah Dunnett’s original is solidly coloured, but I felt that would be too heavy in stitch – not too mention far too much work! Seed stitch to the rescue: it looks properly green but still fairly airy.

I was really pleased with that little apple tree! But then at the end of July Covid hit the Figworthy household, and the tree planting ground to a halt. Even though this was just a fun project, I needed something even less challenging, and also smaller and easier to hold. I transferred the autumnal tree to a separate piece of fabric and over the next few months had a go at that, using Danish flower threads. This also gave me the opportunity to try out another stitch combination, as I’d scribbled down two different ones for this tree. It took until January (not least because my initial choice of vermicelli couching for the internal green didn’t work and had to be unpicked), but then I had a little tree worked in satin, split, stem and Palestrina stitch and colonial knots. It looks a bit flatter than I had expected, but it is decorative enough, and a good trial run for the one in the main project.

I couldn’t decide which of the other two trees to start on next, so I just worked on them both, alternating between what I’d started thinking of as the cypress tree and the one that didn’t really suggest any particular tree to me. My arboretum was now made up of Apple Tree, Autumn Tree, Cypress Tree and Nondescript Tree. Can you see where this might be going…?

In the planning there was an element of padding or some sort of 3D-ness in all the trees, and in Cypress Tree that was mostly the wavy outline, for which I “bunch couched” a bundle of 8 lengths of Caron Wildflowers – very dark green on one side, slightly less dark green on the other. As these trees were always meant as a slightly experimental project, great for trying out things, I decided on striped raised stem stitch for the centre swirl. It’s a bit fiddly but does produce a lovely effect. With all the needle manipulation necessary for this stitch it would have been sensible to have done it before the couched outline, but heigh ho, it’s all a learning process! The vermicelli couching I had reluctantly abandoned in the Autumn Tree also found a place here, and that was another tree completed.

Bunched couching for the Cypress outline

Cypress tree with raised stem stitch and vermicelli couching

Meanwhile I’d also started the Autumn Tree on my main fabric, this time in wool. The raised element here was going to be the padded satin stitch swirls in red, orange and yellow, so after the split stitch stem and whipped stem stitch foliage outline I worked a split stitch base for the red swirl.

Then I started covering it in slanted satin stitch. But when I got to the tip it didn’t look right. I left it temporarily, did a less challenging orange swirl, unpicked the red satin stitch and re-did it with the slant in the opposite direction. I didn’t like the look of that either. So that’s where the Autumn Tree is stuck for now. I’ll get back to it.

The same can’t be said for the Nondescript Tree. The trouble is that it is the least interesting of the four. It doesn’t have the coloured swirls of the Autumn Tree, or the bright apples of the Apple Tree, or the unusual shape of the Cypress Tree. For the “leaves” inside the tree’s crown I couldn’t really think of anything other than padded satin stitch, and that was already in use in another tree. In order to give the creative process a nudge I decided to leave the leaves for the moment and to work the outline of the foliage in yet another stitch (or perhaps more accurately, a technique) I’d not tried before: trailing.

This encompasses laying string or cord (or a bundle of thinner threads) on the line that is to be covered, and then couching this into place with stitches that completely cover the string. It’s very textural, and using a bundle of threads means you can trim some of them towards the end of a line to taper it (a bit like you would in gold cutwork, like Bruce’s tail). I used floche to cover my bundle of string, and found the effect very pleasing – rather smooth and satiny. Taking my couching stitches through the fabric precisely enough was quite tricky, and my line is not perfect – there is a bit of a kink – but all in all I’m happy with the look, and with the taper.

And yet. And yet I am abandoning this tree. It has been really useful in getting me to try out trailing, which is a technique I will definitely use in future designs, but as a whole I simply can’t give it its own character, its USP so to speak. So my arboretum will be a trio of trees. That is to say, if I can get that padded satin stitch to work…

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:

A colourful dodo

Posted on 11th April, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

The peacock I picked from the Bayeux tapestry as inspiration for a crewel project that will be part of a course later this year has been dignified, or rather undignified, with various monikers. Tanya Bentham refers to him in her latest book as an oven-ready chicken, and in a recent talk as a bit of a turkey. Mr Figworthy thinks he looks more like a dodo than a peacock. Now I’m rather partial to dodos – I love Dick King-Smith’s delightful book Dodos Are Forever, there is a Dutch series of comic books in which a resourceful dodo accompanies the hero, and Jasper Fforde, in his Tuesday Next series, created the unforgettable Pickwick (catchword: “Plock”). So I have decided to consider my Bayeux creature a dodo-peacock hybrid, who will henceforth be known as Do-Pea.

The Bayeux tapestry is about 50cm high, from which I calculated that the original peacock stands at a little under 8cm tall. Helpfully having worked this out after picking two sizes in which to transfer my modified outline, I was rather pleased that they happen to be about half a centimetre either side of the original size.

After getting Do-Pea transformed into a usable outline, the next thing was to decide on where to use what stitch (the original uses stem stitch filling as well as the more predictable Bayeux stitch) and in what direction; and the tail needed some work as even with the Bayeux Museum’s excellent high-resolution photographs it wasn’t very clear what the original treatment was – the stitching looks a little the worse for wear, and as I’m not trying to create a perfect copy I thought I might as well do whatever I liked the look of. I went for stripes inside a circle of dots. As I was undecided about whether to use circular stem stitch or satin stitch/Bayeux stitch on those dots and his head feathers I’m trying both (one of the reasons for stitching two models).

Incidentally, I picked two different fabrics for these two dodos: for the larger one a soft woollen fabric (the same that I used for Bartram the Rainbow Ram) and for the smaller some of the vintage Irish linen I inherited from my mother-in-law. It is the latter I’ve started with, in a rather pastel palette (bigger Do-Pea will be much brighter). Unfortunately the blue in this selection is rather too light for the outlining I had in mind, and the next blue I’ve got is the much darker one used on the other version, so I’ve ordered the shade in between (and one or two other colours, just to make the most of the postage you understand).

Until that turns up I’m working on the tail, which doesn’t use blue for any of the filling in. So far I’ve done the pale turquoise and the mid violet parts. What I particularly like about the Renaissance Dyeing wools for this sort of project is that they are not completely uniform in colour – there is some subtle shading along the skein, which which makes for a pleasantly medieval look. No purple or lilac is used in the Bayeux tapestry, but I think it works rather well; perhaps the Bayeux stitchers’ local needlework shop had run out .

By the way, I know some of the dots aren’t particularly regular, but outlining hides a multitude of sins and I want this to be a fairly relaxed project so I’m not trying to be super precise. And wonky dots may make him live up to his name more…

Flights of Fancy

Mabel's musings on anything stitchy

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