Nostalgia, holiday stitching and re-stashing

Posted on 3rd June, 2023 by Flights of Fancy

Mr F and I have returned from our holiday, which was a bit of a nostalgia trip; partly because half of it saw us meeting up with family and friends in my home town and going around the old familiar places, but partly because it was all done in our 1933 Austin Seven Box Saloon (which, should you feel inclined, you can stitch in the style of the Bayeux Tapestry) and included a rally in the north of the country for which we dressed the part. Although this was much appreciated by the spectators, it has its drawbacks. It is not easy to eat the local sticky sugar bread and salted herring we were offered at the various staging posts (not together, I hasten to say) while wearing delicate crocheted gloves…

One of the many nice things on this holiday was coming across various bits of needlework, sometimes unexpectedly: one day we went for lunch at a pancake restaurant situated in an apple, pear and cherry orchard, which has a farm shop attached. While browsing the various fruit juices and locally produced cakes and biscuits I spotted a poster for a small exhibition of sewing and needlework in the next village. That Saturday, which was National Mill Day, I hired a bicycle and cycled there, only to find that the History Society hosting the exhibition was housed next to the local windmill, so I got a working windmill and local brass band as well as a historic sampler and lace caps!

Another find was this pulpit hanging adorning the church of Hindeloopen, a harbour town in the north of The Netherlands. It is not very elaborate, with only small touches of gold and silver and worked in what looks like full threads of stranded cotton in a variety of fairly basic stitches (including an effective use of twisted chain stitch), but no less lovely with its bright colours and beautiful symbolism.

You may wonder whether all this needlework inspired me to pick up the projects I’d brought with me. Well, it did – much to my own surprise I finished one of the two Victoria Sampler kits and got well over half of the second one done. Quite my best holiday stitching result in years!

So some de-stashing has happened – the second kit has meanwhile been finished as well and both will be turned into cards which by their very nature will eventually leave our house – but I’m not sure what to do with the kits themselves. There is quite a bit of thread etc. left, and of course the charts; I will have to find a good home for those. And then there is re-stashing.

Just before going on holiday I got the Melbury Hill newsletter, which mentioned their new kit in celebration of the Coronation. The design centres around the most endearing Cavalier King Charles spaniel, and I fell in love. I showed it to Mr Mabel who decided I hadn’t had an unbirthday present for far too long, and a day or two later this arrived:

I’ve written to Melbury Hill because although I understand that colours on screen can be inaccurate, I felt the ones for the dog were very different even from the printed photograph of the stitched model included in the kit, but apparently they are the thread colours she used so the discrepancy is down to photography and printing. I also asked about part of the stitch instructions which I felt might be confusing to someone not too experienced in needlework, but I haven’t heard back about that – I’ll let you know as and when I do.

Further re-stashing came in the form of bulk threads for the Wildflower Garden and Shisha kits – an excusable purchase, I think – as well as some Madeira silk and Soie Ovale for my RSN Canvaswork module. Don’t the flat silks look scrumptious? It won’t surprise you that they are intended for one of the tulips.

And finally, a case of re-stashing to de-stash (or so I tell myself). A fellow member of a stitching forum asked for the colour key to Teresa Wentzler’s Needle Guardian (now discontinued), which had been chewed by her puppy. I was almost certain I’d purchased that design years ago, and in fact I bought the Dinky Dyes overdyed cotton and Kreinik variegated metallic braid to stitch it, but never got round to it. I found the chart, sent my fellow stitcher the colour key, and was reminded how much I liked the design. So from my stash I got together all the threads and beads, plus a piece of opalescent Lugana; a blingy dragon can always use more bling! There was one shade of DMC, however, which I lent to someone years ago and through various circumstances had never got back. That would need to be ordered. And originally I had bought the Dinky Dyes cotton because the silk was too expensive. But it seemed silly to order just one skein of DMC. So the Dinky Dyes silk was added. And for the same postage I could add a few more threads. So two Caron Waterlilies joined the shopping basket. I haven’t got a particular purpose for them yet but they go really well with another, lighter variegated green that I already have…

Ready to start stitching the Needle Guardian

And so it continues .

Going dotty

Posted on 27th March, 2023 by Flights of Fancy

Over the past year or so, more and more of Mabel’s kits have been given a bit of a makeover; they are now packed in sturdy recycleable cardboard boxes, and increasingly come with the design printed or drawn on the fabric so you can start stitching right away. The latest kits to receive this treatment are the two Shisha ones – the flower on blue fabric, and the tile on pale yellow.

After cutting the fabric into squares and ironing them all I realised that the dots on the blue fabric were not quite as visible as I would have liked them to be. They were there, and I could have left it to the individual stitcher to beef them up a bit if they wanted to, but I want our kits to be convenient and hassle-free, so I made a mug of tea (first things first) and set about accentuating 21 dots each on 48 pieces of fabric.

Now when I first designed these small Shisha projects, I tried several variations; one of them was the number of petals on the flower. 24 was too dense, 20 for some reason I never tried, but 16 and 12 both worked. The kit comes with the 12-petal version printed on the fabric and the 16-petal version as a transfer pattern in the instruction booklet, so you can try out both.

And here they are, the Shisha Flower kit and the Shisha Tile kit both for the first time with pre-printed fabric. Let me know what you think!

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 .

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.

Silks and Cottons and Fluff, Oh My

Posted on 13th June, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

One side effect of designing (and I’m not altogether sure yet whether it’s a perk or a downside) is that practically any purchase of stash can be excused by being “for a new design”, or “for inspiration”. I’m sure stash manages to multiply by using us poor embroiderers as their hosts, although on the whole I think the relationship is symbiotic rather than parasitic . And of course if we weren’t such accommodating hosts, many threads would not survive; even with our concerted efforts, over the past decade we have lost Pearsall’s Filoselle and Filofloss, Eterna silk, Vicky Clayton’s Hand-Dyed Fibers and Carrie’s Creations, to name but a few. But fortunately Caron is still going strong, and I have helped ensure its survival for a bit longer by ordering this lovely lot of Soie Cristale.

I spent a few very pleasant evenings winding them all on bobbins and arranging them in a thread box. Don’t they make a pretty sight?

You may remember that recently I did my bit to keep Rainbow Gallery going as well; partly stocking up on silks for the Quatrefoil kits, but also to fill in some colour gaps in my collection. Some of those silks I used last week in a little experiment: one of the small Hope rainbows in pastels.

I’ve stitched that size rainbow several times now, but usually in much brighter shades; sometimes in standard DMC perles, sometimes (which I like even better) using Caron’s overdyed Watercolour threads.

The first mini rainbows were done on light blue fabric (above right), but once I tried them on the denim-coloured fabric there was no turning back – the contrast with the thread colours, whether pastel or bright, is just so much more attractive. Another change is in the cloud: as you can see the fluffy frill is stitched in different threads. On the earlier mini rainbows (like the one on light blue fabric) it is worked in Rainbow Gallery Wisper, which is quite thin; I thought it would work better than the much chunkier Angora used in the larger Hope designs. But having used Angora on the smaller rainbows a few times (for example in the pastel version and the birthday card above) I found I liked the effect much better, and it is also a little easier to use, so better for my next plan: rainbow kits!

I have yet to decide on all the particulars, but I couldn’t resist supporting Rainbow Gallery and Caron a bit more by stocking up on Angora and Watercolours…

As I’m working out materials and writing instructions, all sorts of ideas are swirling in my head: should the pastel silk one become a kit too? And should the kit perhaps come with a display hoop (red for the bright version, wood grain effect for the pastel one)? Let me know what you think!

Buds and pieces

Posted on 19th April, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

All right, it’s still not stitching on the actual canvas, but at least I have sampled the large green bud as it will eventually look. I changed the single strand of red from a burgundy cotton to a slightly more orangy silk, threaded five needles with various combinations of green perles, and Had A Go. And I must say I like the effect! The only slightly mysterious thing is that my charted version, whose shape was taken from an earlier sample which used the proper design outline, now doesn’t seem to completely fill the design outline (blue arrow). Still, inexplicable though it is, if it turns out to show this behaviour on the real project as well I can easily fill in the missing bit with the darkest shade. I will find this out at my fourth class tomorrow, where I hope to put in this bud and perhaps the pink tulip. Even so, I fear this module may take rather more than the usual eight classes…

The finished bud may need a few more stitches

By the way, earlier this month we finally made it to the Netherlands for the first time in two and a half years and saw lots of family and friends, and slightly more relevant to this blog, the Keukenhof – that incredible garden where growers show off their flower bulbs for two months every year, and which was the inspiration for my Canvaswork design. The flowers change every year, I mean they don’t plant the same ones in the same places, and the photograph I’m working from must have been taken while the park was closed as there are no people in it, but I managed to find pretty nearly the right spot!

In my usual spirit of optimism I took three embroidery projects with me, but only one of them was ever taken out of my stitching bag, and even then I didn’t do an awful lot. Still, Do-Pea now has the stem stitch part of his wing done, plus all the laid-and-couched work in his tail circle.

The blue I needed to outline his tail and fill in the rest of the wing was waiting for me when I got home, together with some other shades. I’m beginning to get quite a collection of Renaissance Dyeing wool! And today a parcel arrived from America with some lovely Splendor silks, some to add to my collection and some (the ones at the bottom) specifically for the Quatrefoil kit. The beads were on offer so I stocked up on some of my favourite shades to make the most of the postage .

Going back to the blue wool needed for outlining, on the Bayeux tapestry this is done using outline stitch rather than its mirror twin stem stitch (it is also done before the laid work, which has the advantage of not covering up internal design lines but which does add a degree of fiddliness I am not prepared to subject myself to). As the wool they used was a normal S-twist, this means the stitches blend into each other more and the resulting line has a less rope-like look than with stem stitch.

Having read about this while I was on holiday the outline/stem issue was obviously still lingering in my mind when I was deciding on stitches for a small project earlier this week. I wanted to stitch the small Hope rainbow but didn’t want to use the three different textures of stem stitch, chain stitch and French knots. On the other hand, stem stitch only seemed a little dull. So I opted for alternating stem and outline stitch, with their subtly different looks, and I’m quite pleased with how that turned out.

Small embroidery projects like these are great for making cards and ornaments for special occasions. Any embroidery project is also a guaranteed method for Finding A Cat. Just place the embroidery in the brightest spot of the house to photograph it, and a cat will magically appear…

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…

James goes bling

Posted on 1st April, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

Some time ago someone suggested that James, the snail from my RSN Jacobean module, would make quite a nice little crewel kit. That is now on my To Do list, but as I was looking at his outline, I suddenly thought, “wouldn’t he look good in gold?” And because there’s always room for another project, I thought I’d have a go. First of all, bits of him needed padding. I wanted the shell raised in the centre, which was done with a rather pleasant-looking little comma of felt with two more layers over the top, and extra stitching to emphasise the spiral. The brick/stone he is sitting on got a single layer of felt as it would be filled in, although I didn’t yet know what with.

My idea was to stick as much as possible to the “layout” of the crewel version, which meant an open body with some dotted shading and a filled-in shell and brick. The best way to represent the shaded satin stitch on the original brick would be vertical cutwork, and I wanted that outlined first. Then there was a line indicating the curved ground the brick rests on, plus the outlining of James’ body. As I wanted to keep them all distinct I went with pearl purl for the sides of the brick, twist for the ground and double passing for the body. The twist was attached with stitches snuggling in between the plies so the couching is invisible.

Time for the shell. I couldn’t see a way of reproducing the “spoke” effect of James’ raised backstitch crewel shell, so I chose to couch along the spiral instead. In order not to lose the spiral in one homogenous mass of circling couching I started with a double line of check thread, with the rest of the shell done in pairs of passing again. A lot more plunging than I’d like, but heigh-ho, it was needed to get the effect I wanted. (Oh, I also added a spangle eye and metallic thread feelers with little beads on the end. I know a snail doesn’t have an eye as such, but I prefer him with one.)

A few dotted bits of bright check in the body to represent the seed stitching in the crewel original, and then on to the brick! Vertical cutwork in one of the cylindrical purls and one of the angular ones, and because it seemed a good idea to have the brick relatively matte compared to James’ shiny shell I picked rough purl and wire check. As always, cutting the chips to exactly the right length was a, uhm, lengthy process – a chip is too long, so you take off a fraction of a smidgen and suddenly it’s too short. I have a fair few spare chips in a separate little bag now…

I decided to shade the chips a bit like the satin stitch in the original to add texture. And when, several hours later, I had covered about half of the brick, I realised I wasn’t sure I liked the look of it. Bother. I’m not even sure why I have second thoughts about it. I like the shading. I even like the look of that row of companionably snug vertical chips in itself. I’m just not sure it makes the brick look the way I want it.

So that’s where I am with Blingy James – he has been temporarily put away while I think about his brick and decide what I want to do with it. I’ll let you know when I know!

Fortunately there are two pieces of goldwork (or more accurately one piece of goldwork and one piece of silverwork) which did get finished, and indeed were finished some time ago. They were the Secret Project which can finally be revealed because the edition of Stitch magazine in which they appear is now in the shops. I present to you: Come Rain, Come Shine – two metalwork samplers in the shape of, respectively, an umbrella and a parasol. If you choose to stitch it, I’d love to see pictures of your finished projects! And as always, if you have any questions about the instructions, the materials or anything else, just drop me a line.

The two projects with the magazine they appear in

Double standards

Posted on 12th January, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

Or rather, double stands. For what is this in the picture? That’s right, a Lowery clamp without felt in the jaws. And that can mean only one thing – I have succumbed to the temptation of a second Lowery stand… (Well, I suppose it could also mean that the felt had come off the jaws of my first Lowery stand, but you’re not going to buy that for a second, are you ?)

For some time now I’ve been considering getting another Lowery; for one thing it would be convenient to have one in both my stitching spots. Convenient, but not essential, as the one that is usually wedged under my comfy arm chair can be moved if necessary to be used at my stitching-spot-by-the-dining-room-window. So that in itself was not sufficient reason to succumb. However, if I go on to do the RSN Diploma after finishing the Certificate I will have to use the large slate frame for some of the modules, and two Lowerys could take the place of the Ikea trestles and make it easier for me to sit near my stitching (demonstrated here with the Millennium frame).

But before using this new Lowery for anything, it needed its jaws softening. I went into the craft room to get the same bits and pieces I used last time, but if you compare that occasion with the bits in the picture above, you will notice that the felt is a different colour. Originally I picked an off-white felt, thinking it was probably best to use a neutral colour as it would be clamped against my embroidery fabric. But besides the colour, I picked it because it was rather stiffer and thicker than my other felt. Well, I must have been using it for other things since then, because there was only a small scrap left, and the only other stiff felt I had was that lilac one.

I felt fairly sure it would be colourfast, and that it wouldn’t leave lilac smears on my fabric, but even so I’d be happier with something white or beige. Unfortunately the only white felt I have is relatively thin; fine for the pages in a needle book, but not what I wanted here, and trying to stick on two layers would be awkward. But then, as I rummaged through my “sticky stuff” drawer (double-sided tape, glue dots etc.) I came across a pack of adhesive felt in various sizes – mostly the sort of circles you stick to the underside of chair legs or coasters, but there was also a sheet of nice thick, stiff, off-white felt!

Some of the cutting guidelines on the back of the peel-off paper even happened to be just right for my purpose. So a few minutes later, the clamp was ready to use.

And a little after that, the whole thing was set up, with Hengest the Medieval Unicorn ready to be finished off (finally).

Not quite yet, though – before Hengest can be finished, there are a few decisions to be made. But that’s a story for another FoF…

Experimenting on robins and ladybirds

Posted on 20th December, 2021 by Flights of Fancy

No no, there’s no need to call the RSPB and the RSPCA – only fabric was hurt in these experiments, by being repeatedly stabbed with a needle. In the case of the robin, I was trying out a herringbone variation which I found when researching stitches for the Canvaswork module. I put in a few rather faint guidelines and worked the first row; as the rows intertwine, my idea was to change the colour gradually from 2 strands of dark through one dark with one medium to two medium and so on. But just as had been the case when sampling this on canvas, it was terribly awkward trying to get the needle up underneath the previous row of stitches as per the instructions in my Anchor Book of Canvaswork Stitches.

Could you perhaps do it differently by going down underneath the previous stitches, which would be easier as you could push those stitches out of the way with the needle when taking it down through the fabric? I tried it on my canvas doodle cloth and yes, it works! The front looks pretty much identical (the blue line shows the stitch done according to the book, the pink line with the alternative way of working it) – any difference in the picture is, I think, the result of having done only two lines the alternative way, which makes it look less dense. It does use more thread on the back (the blue arrow in the second picture points to the tiny stitches on the back when doing it “properly”, the pink arrow to the longer stitches of the not-so-awkward variation) but on the whole I’d say it’s worth it for being much less frustrating and a lot quicker.

So I gave that a try, and got to the first change in shading (dark/medium blend); then realised that I need to do the tail before continuing with the wing/body as it is further back in the design. I wanted to do it in satin stitch over a split stitch edge, so I have to come up at the body end, which would mess up the body stitching if I left it till later. In order to get the impression of texture in there in spite of the flat stitches, I chose to blend my dark and light brown, skipping the medium.

A tail needs seeing to first, with a split stitch outline

Blended satin stitch to make a perky tail

As for the ladybird, that comes from the needlepainting book I recently got. I’ve been wanting to try needlepainting, if only as a preparation for my Silk Shading module, and I also had some new (and older but not much used) fabrics and some new (and older but not much used) silks to experiment with. Fortunately the book comes with some beginner’s exercises and as there are three I’m going to try them with different combinations of fabric and thread. First up: a ladybird shell in Pipers floss silk on Empress Mills’ 440ct Egyptian cotton.

By the way, as I refused to believe that any cotton could have 440 threads to the inch (which is what the count would mean for a counted embroidery fabric like Lugana or Edinburgh linen), I did a bit of digging and found that in cotton for sheets etc. the count includes both the warp and the weft, so 440ct cotton will have 220 threads per inch horizontally and vertically. Still very fine, but not as eye-watering as it sounds at first!

The first, darkest silk for this is appropriately red, but the shading is not going to be subtle – I only have the Pipers silk in about seven jewel-like rainbow colours, so the shell will be worked in red, bright orange and bright yellow. The white will have to be borrowed from another brand of silk. Pipers floss silk is very fine, and being a filament silk it snags easily, which is why you can see the individual filaments in a few bits of the thread. Splitting the stitches took a lot of concentration, and very good lighting! The second picture shows the project with a standard match for scale (and in more accurate colours, having been photographed in daylight). It also shows that my initial row of long and short stitch does not have a very neat bottom edge, so I may unpick that part and start again.

And that’s where I am with these two experiments! I hope to be able to finish them over the Christmas period, while also getting some Canvaswork homework in. But for that, I’m waiting for a Christmas present…

Flights of Fancy

Mabel's musings on anything stitchy

Category Archives: Materials & Equipment