Boxing not-very-clever-yet

Posted on 28th July, 2023 by Flights of Fancy

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

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

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

Fabric cut too large flaps about on the back

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

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

Stitching as close to the bottom of the support as possible

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

Ticking all the boxes

Posted on 10th July, 2023 by Flights of Fancy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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…

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 .

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…?

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.

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 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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