Inspiration from the British Isles

Posted on 24th June, 2014 by Flights of Fancy

Some time ago I mentioned that I’d like to do a “Welsh” design to complement Tudor, Scotland the Brave and Luck of the Irish, and make a set called British Isles. As the three existing designs all have a floral theme I decided against dragons or leeks in favour of daffodils, the result to be called St David’s Day.

One of the stitches that immediately springs to mind (well, my mind anyway) when thinking of daffodils is the woven picot (used in an eight-petal arrangement in Frozen Flower). Two sets of three, in two shades of yellow, one set slightly overlapping the other. And for the trumpet something equally 3D in orange detached chain stitch; perhaps cup stitch, which I first tried (a little raggedly, see picture…) a couple of years ago.

But the design that was vaguely beginning to take shape in my mind would have several daffodils, probably a central one surrounded by four smaller ones. What to do with them? More woven picot flowers? They are quite labour-intensive, and moreover, they stand out and clamour for attention – having five of them in a relatively small design might be a bit too much of a good thing!

Beads then? Stylised daffodils made out of bugle beads for the petals and an ordinary bead for the trumpet? Off to Sew & So to see what’s available only to find that there are no bugle beads in yellow and orange, at least not from Mill Hill. So much for that brainwave. And of course I couldn’t possibly recycle the cross stitch daffodils from Floral Lace; that would be cheating. And anyway, they wouldn’t fit . For a moment I toyed with the idea of silk or organza ribbon, but it would be difficult to get the flowers small enough and again they might overwhelm a design this size.

When a design gets stuck I just leave it at the back of my mind to find its own way for a bit; something usually comes up. And so it did this time. Possibly triggered by the lazy daisy motifs in Extravorganza the idea suddenly presented itself with beautiful inevitability: six lazy daisies, three each in two shades of yellow, echoing the large central flower. And for the trumpet… well, there was a question. A chunky French knot in orange perle #5? But it’s a bit much to expect stitchers to buy a whole skein of orange perle #5 just for four French knots. A bead? Same objection, and I’d rather gone off the idea of beads as none of the other three designs use them. How about a cross between a French knot and a bullion knot to create a sort of thick loop? With a bit of luck it’ll stand proud of the fabric and so make a good stab at representing the centre of a daffodil; and it would use the same perle #8 as the central flower, so no need for yet another thread.

This needed a bit of experimenting, as I wasn’t sure whether to simply work it as a very long French knot – lots of wraps but go down the very next hole – or as a bullion knot with a very short coverage. A minute or so with some spare fabric and thread and it became clear that multi-wrapped French knots just turn into blobs, but that bullion knots worked over one diagonal form rather nice little hoops. Now all I need to do is finish charting and amend the instructions for bullion knots and Wales will be ready to take its place in the British Isles set!

Sore fingers, two Jessicas and a new gadget

Posted on 12th March, 2014 by Flights of Fancy

More – slow – progress on Treasure Trove (I work on it mostly at my Monday afternoon stitching group) and I have learnt something new: leather is tough! Even lovely soft pliable kid. And as I have never been able to work with a thimble, my fingers got pretty sore; at one point I almost succeeded in giving myself a finger piercing. Perhaps I should have put a little silver stuf in it and started a trend…

Anyway, I have now attached all the gold kid, and it looks very pretty and shiny and padded. Next step: embellish the gold roundels with a border of Jessica stitch. Now many instructions for this stitch (for example in Papillon’s Around the World SAL) end with the final stitches lying on top of the first stitches, but that grates with my symmetry obsession. To look the same all the way round, the lest stitches need to be taken underneath the first ones! Having settled that, I worked the first of the Jessica borders, in perle #8. It looked rather chunky. I liked it, but I did wonder whether perle #12 would look better. I decided to do the next one in #12, and then unpick the one I liked least. Unfortunately perle #12 doesn’t come in nearly so many colours as perle #8, so I had to use a darker shade, but at least I could find one that would fit in. And here they are, #8 on the left, #12 on the right:

I like the lacier look of the #12, but it turned out to look too dark after all, and I didn’t like the gold showing through quite so clearly. I will use perle #12 Jessicas in future designs, I’m sure, but here I’m going with the original #8. (One lady at the stitching group suggested doing two in #8, and two in #12, placed diagonally; it would still have symmetry but would use both styles. Clever, but I went with the safer option of having them all the same.)

On a completely different subject, my husband gets these tool catalogues which he peruses with the same enthusiasm which I would accord a hand-dyed thread catalogue with coloured pictures, and occasionally he finds something weird and wonderful for 35p which he simply can’t resist. Sometimes he shares these treasured finds with me, so I am now the proud owner of a pair of magnifying tweezers. I haven’t used them yet, but they do actually look as though they could come in quite handy in Hardanger!

A show and a change of plan

Posted on 14th September, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

I’ve not been a very regular poster over the past couple of weeks! This was at least partly because we were attending a trade show last weekend, and what with preparations beforehand and backlog afterwards, writing Flights of Fancies was rather low on the list of priorities. “A trade show?” I hear you say. “Was there a stitching show on somewhere?” Well, no. Not exactly. This was for the day job, and involved gaskets, crankshafts, hose clips, trafficator knobs and oodles of other bits for pre-war Austin Sevens – the International Autojumble at Beaulieu. It doesn’t look quite like, say, the Treenway Silks show booth…

It’s a lovely part of the country to go to, even though we see very little of it; but on the way there we drive through the New Forest, and every year I try to manage at least one walk into Beaulieu village. It is very picturesque, has a chocolate studio, and at any time you might bump into a New Forest pony, donkey or cow. The first time we went I couldn’t get into the village shop because a donkey was standing in the doorway, completely at ease and with no intention of moving . This time I came across a pony on my way back to the Autojumble field; isn’t it a lovely sight?

As we were staying with a very kind and hospitable cousin this year instead of camping, I even got some stitching done! And here I have a confession to make. You may remember I mentioned some Victoria Sampler kits I had lying around, and my intention to stitch one of them. After a bit of digging I did find the kits, and I picked one to do, and then I got a little distracted (nothing new there). Remember the Guildhouse design which I was hoping to pair off with a companion piece? Well, while charting the companion piece I realised that it wasn’t quite the right size; but I did think of another way of using this particular shape by cutting different parts, and so before I knew it I had a pair of Kloster block shapes, neither of which was the right size to go with the first design. So I had to think of a fourth design – and while I was doing that, and experimenting with different bars (of the Hardanger variety, I hasten to say; don’t picture me on a pub crawl!) suddenly I had a set of three bookmarks all ready-charted.

I did then finally chart a design to go with the Guildhouse one, and I liked it so much that that was what I took with me on our Beaulieu travels. Because of the bead crosses and the double cross stitches and the fact that it is a pair of designs, I decided to call them Double Cross, and when I have stitched number one again (I picked some lovely shimmery lavender beads with a matching shade of Wildflowers) I’ll make them available on the site. For now, I give you a sneak preview of Double Cross 2, and of its new speciality stitch – remember those fuzzed out bars in the picture showing my unsuccessful bead experiments? The time has come to reveal them. I give you *drum roll* the corded bar:

And here is a good example of how designs influence each other: stitching Double Cross with its corded bars and beaded woven bars gave me a rather spiffing idea for two-coloured corded bars, so I re-charted the bookmarks (now called Ex Libris) to incorporate them. I have a feeling it may be a while before I get round to that Victoria Sampler kit…

Theory and practice

Posted on 27th August, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

It was a Bank Holiday weekend and so I decided to do some much-needed maintenance in our much-neglected (but much-loved) garden. We’d bought some bedding plants (marigolds and violets, I think, but I’m still not very well up on English plant names) at the local car boot sale, and the idea was to plant half of them in a bare patch of back garden, and half in a bed in the front garden where there is also a cotoneaster that needed a haircut. Of course it’s never that simple. Sunday afternoon saw several hours of all-out war on ground elder before we could even think of planting anything, and on Monday the cotoneaster’s short back and sides turned out to need a machete rather than dainty seccateurs. Still, we won! Two small patches of our garden are now fit to be seen by other people besides ourselves. It’s not exactly Chelsea Flower Show material, but it’s a lot better than it was.

The back garden after a LOT of weeding and a little planting

a shrub with a haircut, and some new plants

Fortunately the gardening did leave some time for experimental needlework. Unfortunately, both the experiments were unsuccessful. Occasionally you come up with this great idea, and in your head it works absolutely beautifully, and on paper it looks perfectly feasible, and then you get the fabric and needle and thread out and it simply will not work. I’m afraid this was the case with my ideas for beaded picots and buttonhole bar fillings.

Ordinary buttonhole bars are worked on one or more foundation stitches (see below), and apart from the ends of those foundation stitches the bars are unattached to the fabric; it is sometimes known as detached buttonhole stitch, and you can fill whole shapes with it. One day, as I was trying out some new Hardanger bars, I looked at the four fabric threads that make up a bar, and thought, “what if I used two of those as the foundation threads for a buttonhole bar?” It’s a simple enough idea – come up in the cut hole beside the bar, then take the needle over two threads (so going down the centre of the bar) leaving a loop, and come back up in the cut hole, catching that loop. Continue in the same way until the end of the bar, and hey presto, buttonhole bar filling.

If it works like this...

The beaded picot also seemed uncomplicated both in my mind and on paper (see below): weave half a bar, then instead of making a little knot or loop to form the picot, knot your thread around a bead, then continue weaving. The bead will sit snugly against the bar, making a novel, colourful and slightly chunky picot replacement.

A promising sketch

The theory looked promising – so I got out my “experiment hoop” to try them out in practice. Alas. I tried several ways of attaching the bead picots, and none of them would stay where it was put; the ones that did stick in roughly the right place had a lot of thread showing. You will note that in my sketch I’d drawn the bead with its hole running away from the bar, whereas what happened in practice (and what I should have forseen) was that the hole ran from the front of the work to the back. The buttonhole bars were, if possible, worse. They twisted. It turned out to be absolutely impossible to keep them flat with a pretty buttonhole edge on the outside of the bar. I tried them over two threads (red arrows), over two with the buttonhole edge on the inside (green arrow, the edge has completely disappeared), and covering the whole width of the bar (blue arrow). None of them worked.

I would have said “back to the drawing board”, if the drawing board hadn’t turned out to be so unreliable! It just goes to show there’s nothing like actually stitching something to see if it will work. Oh, and those two fuzzy, blurred bars in the top right of the picture? They were experiments that did work which I’m not revealing just yet .

A different cutting pattern

Posted on 25th June, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

When you’ve done a bit of Hardanger you soon get used to the standard pattern of cutting – five stitches and four cuts to every Kloster block, and never, ever cut a fabric thread unless both tips of your scissors share a hole with a stitch. And when you’ve removed the cut fabric threads, it looks something like this:

Normal cutting pattern

Of course there are variations on this. Sometimes a design will use double-sided Kloster blocks, that is to say cut on both sides. It is sometimes used to create a heavier line than is possible with woven or wrapped bars, sometimes to delineate different parts in a design (like the dragonfly’s wings in Resurrection). Even so, the pattern of the holes is the same as usual.

Double-sided cutting pattern

Sometimes the cutting pattern, the distribution of the holes, is the standard one, but the Kloster blocks aren’t; they may be a different shape, with longer or shorter stitches, or they may be wider than usual (some of the Kloster blocks in Frills are 7 stitches wide instead of 5). Or they may not be blocks at all but a continuous line of satin stitch, so that you have to be very careful which fabric threads to cut and which to leave, as in this blossom motif from Blackthorn.

Continuous satin stitch, normal cutting pattern

But a year or so ago I came across a different cutting pattern; it took me a while to realise why it looked odd, and then I twigged – the holes were in a different and rather unexpected place! It made for a very attractive pattern, though, and when I saw it again in a Hardanger Atelier leaflet I felt it would be a waste to learn about something new and nice and then not use it! Badges, a set of tiny projects designed for ornaments or quick invitations or place cards, seemed just the right opportunity. So here is the alternative cutting pattern, once with one hole, once with four; they’ll be finished with a variety of bars, fillings and extra surface stitches once my right middle finger recovers from a slight mishap while chopping chorizo last night …

An alternative cutting pattern - 4 holes

Customer feedback and some bead experiments

Posted on 19th March, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

Have you ever written something – a letter, an essay, a report – and gone over it several times, then sent it off only to be told by the recipient that there was a paragraph missing, or that a date was incorrect, or that the wrong picture had been used to illustrate a point? I hope there are at least a few of you out there who have to say “yes” to that; let’s just say that if to err is human, there is no doubting my humanity!

But what a difference it makes how those errors are brought to your attention. Some people delight in pointing out to others exactly where they went wrong, and some accompany it with a condescending, mock-pitying smile. Not so fellow-stitchers. In the kindest tones and without the slightest resentment they inform me that the stitched model does not have all the cutting done (Vienna), that some cutting in the design is not actually mentioned in the instructions (Schwarzwälder Kirsch), or that the light grey in the chart is practically invisible when printed, and obscured by the watermark (Resurrection); and because of that, I can rectify these things. And when I rewrite chart packs (adding instructions for double-sided Kloster blocks, for example) they give me their feedback so that I know whether these new instructions are clear enough. I hope I never forget to thank you personally when you help me improve my designs, but here is a public and communal Thank You to everyone who has sent me feedback over the past two years.

Of course it’s even better to get the wrinkles ironed out before a chart pack goes “live”. That’s one of the reasons why I stitch every design before writing the instructions – especially important when a chart contains new stitches or new variations on stitches which so far exist only in my head and on paper. Will they work in fabric and thread? In real life, will they look like my mental picture of them? Well, sometimes they do, which is a wonderful feeling. When I first tried out the beaded diagonals and beaded woven bars I had scribbled down on a scrap of paper in the middle of the night and they actually looked like I expected them to look, it was really quite thrilling! They became the starting point for Beadazzled, a sampler-type design which will include as many beaded stitches as I can think of (they were also used in Coral Cross, for which they were just right).

And so in between stitching other things I am trying out all sorts of ways to combine threads and beads. Some of them sound good when I describe them to myself, but turn out to be impossible to stitch. Some look a bit of a mess, and I can’t quite work out whether that’s a fatal flaw in the stitch itself, or the fact that I’m using cheap, unbranded and incredibly uneven beads for my experimenting (definitely a false economy, that). Some work exactly the way they should (yay!) and get included in the design. And some are simply a lost cause. Creating a woven picot with a beaded edge seemed like a good idea – challenging and decorative. It was challenging all right. It was also a complete failure which looked like a misshapen Christmas tree …

But don’t worry, I found a different way of incorporating beads in a woven picot!

A silly mistake, pretty threads and a new idea

Posted on 12th March, 2013 by Flights of Fancy

Last Sunday I was sitting with an elderly friend so his daughter and wife could both go to church for Mothering Sunday, and I’d taken Happy Hour 1 with me to stitch. Of the four designs in the set, it is definitely my favourite, and it is the one that uses the threads which inspired the set, those lovely Australian Cottage Garden perles. I’d picked an opalescent 28ct Lugana to work the model on, and as we were chatting I settled down to some serious stitching. #12 satin stitch centre in Oregano green, #8 satin stitch, almost Florentine, around it in Dahlia pink. Looking good! Leaf stitch in Oregano, and then on to some triple chain stitch. I’m sure I must have seen something like it somewhere, but I couldn’t find it in any of my stitch dictionaries, so I did my own stitch diagram, and wrote the instructions. It’s basically like a detached chain stitch (also known as a lazy daisy), but instead of only one loop of thread held down with a little securing stitch, I wanted to have three loops.

I had drawn a detailed diagram. I had written a description of every step. And yet it wasn’t until I actually tried to work the stitch that I realised its fatal flaw: I would have to come up in the hole that I’d just gone down in, not once, but twice. And I hadn’t noticed!

I decided to work the plain chain stitch border instead, and re-chart the triple chain stitch when I got home. Having considered two possible solutions to the problem, I eventually settled on a small anchoring stitch, and all three loops going underneath it but all starting in separate holes. The other solution, by the way, was to start all three loops in the same hole, and to anchor each one with its own little securing stitch, which would form a line together. Either way there are three different-sized loops siting inside each other, a very pleasing effect though not what I had in mind originally. You’ll be able to see what you think about the stitch when Happy Hour goes live.

And when will that be? Possibly sooner than I had originally thought – I’m enjoying them so much that they are my main project for the moment. Having finished three of the four there was a slight wait because I didn’t have the Threadworx perles needed for the last one, but they arrived this morning from trusty old Sew & So which means it’ll probably get finished tonight after choir practice! There is more #5 than #8 in this design and so it’s a bit of a shame that the lavendery #5 is not nearly so variegated as the #8, but I was pleased with how well it went with the green; it’s always a bit of a gamble, matching colours based on what you see on a computer screen!

And finally, the new idea. As I was writing the church newsletter and looking at illustrations for the Easter services I came across one I did some time ago, which said “Christ is risen. He is risen indeed!” in various languages. One of them was Old English, the language spoken by the Anglo-Saxons, and I was thinking it would make rather a nice Easter project to have those Old English words surrounded by a knotwork border or something of the sort. There is no way I’m going to get anything like that charted by the end of this month, however, so watch this space when we’re getting into Lent 2014 .

Working on the SAL

Posted on 22nd October, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

November is getting nearer, and so I’m starting to get just a little bit twitchy. The whole SAL has been charted and half has been stitched, but that still leaves 6 projects to finish with only 10 days to go until the Materials List is due. Oh well, nothing like a challenge.

It still surprises me how you can completely miss things about charts you’ve drawn yourself until you actually stitch them. So far I have corrected missing bars, elements that aren’t quite lined up, and Kloster blocks with the stitches going in the wrong direction.

And of course there are the usual things which crop up whenever I work a stitched model – in one design I stitched part of the border only to find that I really disliked the way it looked. So one of the two speciality stitches in it was ruthlessly cast aside, and the border now consists of two off-set rows of the other speciality stitch.

Then I realised that two types of bar which I thought were part of the SAL had in fact not got into in any of the designs. Some quick recharting was called for, which took a bit of doing as I didn’t really want to start making changes to any of the months that I had already stitched!

While stitching one of the models I started wondering whether it would be possible to incorporate beads in bars, but instead of being sensible and experimenting on a scrap of spare fabric I just tried it out in the model I was working on. It didn’t work. Unpicking beads from bars is not easy … Even so I’m not giving up the idea entirely; I still think it may work with a different type of bar. Watch this space.

Quite a few things may still change in the designs for July to December, but as they stand now the whole series will contain (besides Kloster blocks and other typical Hardanger satin stitch elements) six types of bars, 11 filling stitches, three different ways of using beads, one ribbon stitch and 26 or so speciality stitches. I hope you will enjoy them!

Ways of starting (II)

Posted on 10th October, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

In my last post I looked at the waste knot and the away knot as a method of fastening on your working thread. Here are two more methods, or to be precise two methods plus a variation. The first one I’m sure you’re all familiar with; it’s the one I’ve been using ever since I started doing cross stitch and I’m not even sure it’s got a name. I call it the Tail method because you start by bringing the needle up through the fabric, leaving a tail at the back of the fabric (picture 1). Then start stitching, making sure you over the tail as you go (pictures 2 & 3). All three pictures show the back of the work.

A great favourite of mine, and a great one to keep your back tidy, is the loop start. It only works when working with an even number of threads or strands, unfortunately, but when it works it’s very neat. It can be worked in two ways, one of which is even cleverer than the other! Both start by doubling your strand or strands and threading the needle with the cut ends (picture 1, below). The difference is whether the loop is left at the front or the back of the fabric. If you leave it at the back (that is to say, you bring the needle up for the first stitch as usual) you need to turn your work over to catch the loop. With the "front loop" method everything happens at the front of your work.

To begin, take the needle down the fabric at the beginning of your stitch, where you would normally bring the needle up. Don’t pull it all the way through but leave a loop at the front of the fabric. Then bring the needle up at the other end of the stitch (picture 2). Take the needle through the loop (picture 3) and pull the thread right through (picture 4). Take the needle down the same hole in which you came up, making sure you catch the loop (picture 5). Pull the thread right through, so that the loop gets pulled to the back of the fabric. Voilà, one anchored stitch (picture 6).

I suddenly realised there is another method which I use quite often but haven’t mentioned yet – and I haven’t got pictures of it either, but I hope a verbal description will be clear enough. This method only works if you’ve already done some stitching, and I tend to use it in Hardanger to fasten on the perle #8 for the bars and filling stitches after I’ve worked the Kloster blocks. At the back of the work I take the needle behind one or two Kloster blocks, ending up near where I want to start stitching; then I loop the thread round the last of the stitches that I’ve passed under. This anchors it very effectively.

If I’ve missed any really efficient ways of fastening on, do let me know – I always like to learn new methods!

Ways of starting (I)

Posted on 6th October, 2012 by Flights of Fancy

As I was stitching one of the Guildhouse course models (the silk sampler) I got distracted into thinking about ways of starting a thread. Most instructions I have read over the years tend to say breezily "fasten on your thread" before moving swiftly on to the much more interesting matter of how to work the design or stitch. I will admit to doing so myself in Mabel’s chart packs, although in a good number of the stitch diagrams I do add something like "fasten on behind a Kloster block", and the diagram will show where; and of course in the Beginners’ Kits I specifically describe how and where to fasten on. But generally speaking, it is left to the stitcher to decide what method she or he will use.

And there are quite a few methods on offer, some with variations. You probably know several of them already, but I thought it might be helpful to have them all described. I’ve even produced some pictures! In fact I’ve produced rather a lot of pictures, so I’ll show the Waste Knot and the Away Knot today, and the Tail start and Loop start in the next post

The Waste and Away Knot methods are really two variations on a theme: both involve a knot that sits at the front of your work for a bit and is then snipped off and discarded. Several sites refer to the Away Knot as the Away Waste Knot, showing that they regard it as a type of waste knot. So what is the difference?

Let’s start with the waste knot. This is particularly useful if you are going to work a number of stitches in one direction. Tie a knot in the end of your thread and take the needle down the fabric a little way away from where you will start stitching (picture 1), making sure that you will be stitching in the direction of the knot. Work your stitches (picture 2 – I’m doing some fairly raggedy satin stitch). Picture 3 shows the back of the work, covering the thread. When you reach the knot, pull it up a little and snip it off. The cut end will disappear into the fabric, and you can continue stitching.

But what it you’re stitching a few random French knots, or a stitch where there is very little thread at the back of the work so you would have to keep turning over your work to check that you are actually covering and anchoring the thread? Well, you could try an away knot. It starts in the same way, with a knot at the end of your thread – but this time you take the needle down about 4" / 10cm away from where you will start stitching, and in the opposite direction to where you will be going (picture 1). Start stitching; I worked a number of French knots. At the back of the work you can see where I travelled from French knot to French knot, and you can also see the thread stretching to my away knot (picture 2). Now snip the knot at the front of the fabric, turn the work over and thread the needle with the loose end. Take the needle under some of the stitches to secure the thread (picture 3).

One note of caution about the away knot – it is very easy to underestimate the length of thread you will need to be able to comfortably secure it later, and few things are more exasperating than threading a cut end that turns out to be too short to work with. 4" is really about as little as you can get away with! This does make it probably the most wasteful method of fastening on, and so it is unlikely to become anyone’s default method, but it’s a useful one to have in your repertoire.

Flights of Fancy

Mabel's musings on anything stitchy

Category Archives: Stitches