Well, a baby in triplicate. Last week we had the lovely news that a baby had arrived safely into the world: little Evelyn. Both the new parents and all three grandparents are church friends of ours (I actually taught the baby’s mum in Sunday school, which makes me feel terribly old), so three cards were needed. I had to find a nice baby motif, and also decide whether to embroidery the name on each card.

Now many years ago in one of the many cross stitch magazines that I used to pick up at car boot sales I found a very pretty pattern of a baby-on-a-frilly-blanket, and I stitched it for a friend’s daughter’s first Christmas. Some years later I stitched it again (with darker hair, to match the baby in question) for the newborn son of friends of ours. That was quite an interesting card to make as there was a power cut halfway through, and as I was going to see the family the next day I finished stitching it by the light of an Aladdin lamp.

I felt this would be a good motif to use for the three cards needed this time, but doing it in the original cross stitch version would take far too long. Fortunately it wasn’t difficult to turn it into a line drawing and transfer it to three bits of fabric. For the threads I decided on floche with possibly some Blomstergarn (Danish flower threads) – I have a sum total of five skeins of it and tend not to use it much because cream, two yellows and two greens don’t give a lot of scope beyond the odd buttercup or dandelion. But I wanted to make the romper suits different colours so they don’t look like a job lot, and the yellow and green would make a nice bright splash of colour.

Baby #1 was soon finished and I was particularly pleased with the frilly blanket, but a few tweaks were needed. The eye was too dark, so I took it out and re-did it in a lighter brown after this picture was taken. I also decided that in the other two I would work the face outline in whipped backstitch instead of split stitch – it makes a cleaner line – and use a slightly darker pink. As for the name, the embroidery would have to be very fine and fiddly and take rather a lot of time, so I settled for writing it on the fabric in silver or gold gel pen when mounting them in the cards.

Baby #2 had the tweaks incorporated, and I did like the face outline better this way. In my quest to make them all different I left out the detailing in the hair and stitched the romper suit in two shades of green with the darker one used at the tummy and the far sleeve; I also added some petite beads.

Baby #3 was given a yellow romper suit and darker hair; I couldn’t tell from the few photos I’d seen what Evelyn’s actual hair colour is, but her mother is a fair ginger and her father quite dark, so it’s anybody’s guess. This time I added tiny sequins, which I wanted to put in the same arrangement as the beads. Unfortunately I miscounted when getting them out of the bag and I found I was one short, but by that time the bag had been put away in the craft room and Lexi was comfortably curled up on my lap with no intention of moving. Explaining to Mr Figworthy exactly where in the craft room to find a small bag of 2mm sequins was just too complicated, so I re-spaced the sequins I had.

Now all that remained was to turn all three into cards. I found three aperture cards in colours roughly matching each of the romper suits, but that looked a bit dull so I mixed them up. I added the baby’s name making sure the whole thing still fitted inside the aperture, and then had a think about what to write on the card. “Congratulations” would be the usual thing but for some reason I didn’t like that; you sometimes see “A new baby!” or “It’s a girl!” but that sounded a bit obvious. And then I remembered the baby’s middle name – perfect .

Do you find that you have certain favourite materials and stitches for the various types of embroidery? I’ve been doing quite a bit of goldwork recently (you may have noticed…) and certain metals and threads have been steadily emerging as favourites whereas others are on the avoid-if-possible list. The larger sizes of rococco, for example, definitely fall into the latter category (I much prefer the also wavy but finer check thread); and passing thread in its various weights is one I reach for with much more enthusiasm than Jap, with which it shares certain characteristics. It’s a shame that Jap and rococco are required in my Certificate piece, whereas check thread and passing are not allowed.

So what is passing, and how does it differ from Jap? Well, they both have a thread core (silk or cotton); the difference lies in what is wrapped around the outside. In Jap this is a relatively wide strip of metal foil paper, whereas in passing it is a metal wire or a thin strip of metal. This makes passing slightly stiffer, but also more suitable to take around sharp bends – Jap’s foil wrapping sometimes comes away from its thread core if the bend falls right in the middle of a wrap.

A few weeks ago someone on the Needle ‘n Thread Facebook Group mentioned a shop called Tied to History which, they said, had some great bargains on discontinued threads, among them fine passing. This sounded interesting! I had a quick look, and before long several shades of fine passing had made it into my shopping basket, including a lovely rose gold which you may remember I thought might work for adding wavy highlights to Mechtild’s hair. When they arrived, I was not disappointed – lovely fine threads, much finer than any of the passing I had in my stash.

In fact what it most resembled was an unidentified metal thread I was given by my mother-in-law a few years ago. And like that thread, it seemed to be a bit betwixt and between: relative to the thread’s thickness, the wraps around the core are much narrower than in Jap, but rather wider than in passing. When I asked the seller about this, she said that she wasn’t an embroiderer herself but a maker of historic costumes; she hadn’t been able to find a thin enough metallic in the US, so had begun to source them herself, and eventually found these in India. She said she might well not be using the correct technical term for them. Be that as it may, they are lovely fine threads, and I look forward to using them!

But to do that, I need to undo the skeins. I started with one of the silver ones, partly because I bought two of them so if something went wrong I’d still have the other skein. Call me a pessimist, but metallic threads can be unruly and challenging, as I knew only to well after tackling the Jap that came in the bundle of gold threads my mother-in-law passed on to me.

And yes, before too long I ended up with an almighty tangle. Sigh. I contacted the seller, who said yes, the threads could be challenging to store; she usually popped them around a jam jar and took off as much as she needed, straightening the thread as she went. I can’t quite visualise the jam jar, but over the Christmas period, when the light is rather too bad for any serious goldwork stitching, I hope to take a leisurely afternoon or so to create shiny order out of metallic chaos. Wish me luck!

As I got back from my Certificate class last Wednesday there was a padded envelope waiting for me among the Christmas cards. I opened it to find that it contained… a Christmas card! But there was a reason for the protective wrapping, which became apparent when I looked inside the very pretty stitched card – three little glassine bags containing three shades of gold bright check. What a lovely surprise to have some sparkle added to a dark December afternoon. Unfortunately the Certificate brief means I can’t use any of these kind gifts in Bruce the Kangaroo, but I’m sure I will find a good purpose for them.

One thing the bright check won’t cause is the sort of gold spaghetti I ended up with at the back of my work after plunging the mixed couching on Bruce’s back. I’ll tell you more about the front of the work in a later FoF, but I thought I’d show you the slightly dispiriting sight that greets me at the moment when I turn over a frame whose front looks quite neat and tidy.

The curved needles that come with the Certificate starter kit are fairly chunky which makes it difficult to pick up only the backing calico, and oversewing some earlier plunged threads I’d managed to catch the silk as well as the backing so that the sewing thread was visible at the front. This had to be unpicked (fortunately the silk wasn’t damaged) and re-done. I ditched the kit needle and used a curved beading needle I acquired a while ago. Well, I acquired two, but they are rather fragile and I broke one a few weeks ago. Now at the class Becky, the tutor, mentioned that a quilting shop near Hampton Court Palace did curved needles that were thinner and more flexible than the RSN ones, but sturdier than beading needles, so I rang them and ordered a couple of pairs. When they arrive I’ll get all those ends secured, and then Bruce and Haasje will go into hibernation over Christmas.

When I posted the spaghetti picture in a stitching forum, a fellow member asked about the wastage rate of goldwork threads, seeing that they are not the cheapest of materials to buy. Thinking it over, I found that actually it’s not too bad. Wastage in goldwork comes mainly in the couched threads where the ends of the thread get pulled through to the back (plunged) for the purpose of finishing off. The hollow wires that you treat like beads have (in theory at least) no waste at all because you cut them exactly to size; I say “in theory” as this takes a lot of practice, but even when you’re not yet very good at estimating the right length relatively little is thrown away – bits that are a little too long or short can usually be used elsewhere in the project. The same goes for pearl purl which is the only one of the couched materials to be cut to size and not plunged (because it doesn’t have a thread core). In fact, if you restrict your materials to pearl purl and the various flexible hollow purls and checks (and spangles), you won’t see any gold at the back of your work at all!

Anything with a thread core gets plunged, so you leave at least an inch on both sides; I actually tend to leave a little more when I pre-cut lengths, as I did for Bruce’s back where the lines are relatively short. The shorter the couched length, the greater the wastage as a percentage of the length used. But in Bruce’s hind leg, for example, where for the central part I’ll just be going round and round and round, the plunged bits will be a relatively small percentage.

And even then I can’t really think of the plunged ends as “wastage” because, well, you need to finish off! In much the same way that you weave the thread end in when doing cross stitch or Hardanger you need to secure these gold threads. You only oversew about 10 to 15mm but you do need a bit more to pull to the back so you do tend to cut off a few centimetres each time after securing, and those offcuts can’t be used for anything else. Still, on the whole it’s fairly economical with the materials (depending to some extent on the design) – most of the gold is definitely on the front where it is seen!