Tag Archives: Rainbow Gallery

Silks and Cottons and Fluff, Oh My

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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 smiley. 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.

My new Caron silks

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?

Soie Cristale all wound and boxed

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.

Mini Hope rainbow in pastel shades

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.

A birthday rainbow An overdyed rainbow

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…

Rainbow Gallery Angora Materials for a rainbow kit

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!

A Hope ornament

Pretty threads and a parrot project

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In my search for inspiration threads for canvaswork I came across a job lot of Rainbow Gallery Silk Lamé on eBay. Will they be used in the RSN Canvaswork module? Perhaps. Certainly not all of them. But they are very, very pretty, and they came to less than half price. I succumbed.

Rainbow Gallery Silk Lamé

These threads are for future projects, however, so we will put them aside for now and move on to the exciting topic of Travel Projects! I need a travel project for when we go and visit my mother-in-law. I don’t actually need a new travel project because there are at least four small existing ones, ranging from itty bitty (the Quatrefoil I started in order to try out the Quaker Tapestry transfer method and a padded rose about which I will write more in a future FoF) to a little bit larger but still fitting a 5″ hoop (the Ottoman Tulip and the kaleidoscope design I got from Oh Sew Bootiful). But you know how it is…

Some time ago I found one of those small Anchor embroidery books in a charity shop – there’s a whole series of them, introductory guides about 6″ not-quite-square. This one was about crewelwork, and besides stitch descriptions it also has photographs of projects worked using these stitches (although as quite a few of them are worked in stranded cotton or perle they aren’t strictly speaking crewelwork), as well as transfers for most of these designs in the back of the book.

The Anchor Crewel book

One design that caught my eye was a parrot on a branch. True, because of the way the big circle around his eye had been stitched he looked rather grumpy, and the colours (purples and blues and pinks on a blue background) were not what I would have chosen, but in spite of all that he had that indefinable quality of Potential. This parrot could go places!

Parrot from the Anchor book, far too blue and purple

And so he will – to Devon, when we visit my mother-in-law smiley. I wanted him to be a relatively small and simple project, so I left out quite a bit of the foliage when I transferred him onto a spare piece of Essex linen I had lying around. As for threads, I’m doing quite a lot of things in crewel wool at the moment so he is not going to be a proper crewel parrot; instead, I’m going to use some of the DMC floche I got from America several years ago. Because it’s so difficult to find here I’ve never felt able to use it in any of my own designs, as it would be difficult for customers from the UK and Europe to get the threads. But Percy Parrot here is just for my own enjoyment, so I can use whatever I like. I’ve put my whole (admittedly not extensive) collection of floche in the travel box so I can decide what colours to use as I stitch, and I haven’t got a stitch plan – he is going to be very free freestyle.

A parrot travel project

By the way, that little blue bird shape in the project box is a hummingbird needle threader – Mary Corbet wrote about it on Needle ‘n Thread and I found it was available in the UK as well for only a couple of pounds; it looks like a good one for threading the smaller needles, which isn’t always easy with regular needle threaders. The trick in using it appear to be that after you’ve pushed the little hook through the needle’s eye and hooked the thread you move the needle along the threader to slip it off rather than pulling the threader through. I haven’t used it yet, but I’ll let you know how I get on with it!