Stitching a memory, part 2

Posted on 1st January, 2022 by Flights of Fancy

First of all a very happy and healthy new year to you all! May there be joyful meetings with loved ones, plans which do not end up being cancelled or postponed, and oh yes, some stitching as well .

Generally you look back on New Year’s Eve and forward on New Year’s Day, but I hope you won’t mind if I start with a memory, or rather, a memory bear. Having decided on prick-and-pen (like prick & pounce, only you make the dots by going through the holes with a fine drawing pen) as the transfer method most likely to succeed, I traced the signature printed at 5½cm wide, pricked it and tried it on the foot, only to find that it looked rather smaller there than I had expected. As it would be easier to stitch the larger it got, I tried several other sizes before settling on 7cm. The heart was there to be transferred later if I needed an extra bit in which to fasten on and off, but that turned out not to be necessary.

Five-and-a-half centimetres is too small

Having carefully poked the drawing pen’s tip through all the holes, I then joined them up and fastened on.

In order to get comfortable using the sewing method rather than my usual stabbing style, I started with the lesser challenge of the underlining. Back stitch one way, whipping in the opposite direction, and then take the needle up to the writing itself. I had cut a ridiculously long thread so that I would only have to fasten on and off once, and had planned my route accordingly.

Fortunately the bear hadn’t been stuffed too firmly and the foot had plenty of give, so the sewing method presented no great problems. On top of that, the vintage Filoselle silk behaved beautifully (what a terrible shame it’s been discontinued!) even at this unprecedented length, so that my worries about whipping the backstitch soon dissolved. I’m glad they did, because it is the whipping that makes it look like one continuous line of writing rather than a line of dashes.

And here it is, finished. Not all the lines are as even as I would have liked, but it is recognisably Elizabeth’s handwriting, in Elizabeth’s silk, on Elizabeth’s jacket. A bear of many memories.

…and more silk.

Posted on 27th October, 2021 by Flights of Fancy

Did you know that so far none of Mabel’s kits use silk? I know, it’s shocking! Time to do something about it, using that pretty little flower, the Quatrefoil. Putting together a new kit means sourcing supplies, which in this case means more silk. Ah, the sacrifices I make for my customers…

To begin with the fabric, I decided on a dark red silk dupion. The obvious place to go for that was The Silk Route, who were so helpful in finding just the right silk for Bruce. Unfortunately (it is a recurring theme, I know) it is very difficult to accurately judge colours on screen, so I rang them and they very kindly sent me two dark red samples to choose from. I then wondered whether dark blue wouldn’t work as well, rang again, and even though they had already sent off the first two samples, they popped another one in the post to me!

The blue turned out to be rather too dark, and of the two reds the lighter one was definitely the one to go for. They agreed to cut my half metre lengthwise, which means less waste and a few more kit-sized squares than if it was cut widthwise. It’s a power-woven silk dupion, which is smoother and more even in texture than the hand-woven type (this difference will come up in my Goldwork assessment FoF too). I like my kits to be accessible for stitchers who have no experience with a particular technique, so not putting too many slubs in their way seemed like a good plan.

To do the silk fabric justice, the design is stitched using silk threads. I chose Rainbow Gallery Splendor silk because, well, really just because it is one of my favourite silks with its subtle sheen and lovely soft feel, but also because it is, in my experience, one of the easier silks to work with. To complement the silk, and because a bit of bling always adds a certain je ne sais quoi (not to mention joie de vivre), the petals are outlined in gold Jap with a choice of couching thread: easier but more visible sewing thread, or bouncier and more slippery but practically invisible translucent couching thread. Add needles, an aperture card and some wadding and you’ve got the components of a new kit.

And after a fair bit of measuring, cutting, tying, winding, folding and packaging… *fanfare and drumroll* you’ve got our new Silk & Gold Quatrefoil kit!

PS – Just to reassure anyone interested in the Quatrefoil kit in the light of my previous PS about filament silks, Splendor is a spun silk so hopefully no moths were harmed in the making of it.

Silk, silk…

Posted on 24th October, 2021 by Flights of Fancy

I have got a new embroidery book. Yes, another one. Shush. Anyway, it is all Mary Corbet’s fault for writing yet another irresistible review. It will no doubt be very useful for the Silk Shading module of the RSN Certificate, but really that’s just an excuse. In fact it seemed to be the sort of informative and beautifully illustrated book that would be worth having and reading even if you never stitched anything from it – and so it turned out to be. Background information about pollinators, instructions for needlepainting, and lots and lots of lovely photographs of the exquisitely stitched projects. I love it.

Victoria Matthewson's needlepainting book

Information about the plants and pollinators stitched in the book

Very detailed photographs illustrate the needlepainting process

It joins Tanya Bentham’ Opus Anglicanum book on my current browsing pile, and they make a dangerous pair – because they mention various silks and materials that I now want to try out!

Do you remember Ethelnute the Opus Anglicanum king? He was stitched using Silk Mill silk, which like the ones mentioned in Tanya Bentham’s book is a filament silks, made from unbroken silk reeled off the cocoon of the silk worm (which is why some suppliers call it “reeled silk”). It is beautifully shiny, but not as flat as the ones Tanya uses, so the sheen on those should be even more spectacular.

I’d never heard of tram silk, but it sounded rather interesting, so I ordered a taster pack through Tanya’s site. You can get full reels from the suppliers she mentions in her book, the Handweavers Studio, but getting a reasonable range of colours plus postage would be quite expensive, which led me to go for Tanya’s mixed pack of smaller cops. Exasperatingly, I received the book with its link to Handweavers the Monday after returning from London, where on one of my walks I passed through the street where their shop is without knowing it! Oh well, I will now have a few more shades to play with plus two fabrics I hadn’t used before which I popped into my shopping basket to make the most of the postage: ramie, a fine linen-like fabric, and a lovely soft wool fabric used for Bayeux-style embroidery.

A lovely range of tram silk colours and two fabrics

Talking of fabrics, the Pollinator book mentions a fabric that I looked at on one of the stands at the Knitting & Stitching Show, a silk/cotton blend. I nearly bought a fat quarter and then decided against it because I didn’t know what I’d use it for. Sigh.

Back to silk. The other one that caught my attention was the silk produced in various weights by DeVere Yarns, especially when I found that it was mentioned in both my recently acquired books – quite a recommendation!

I’d heard of DeVere Yarns before, and I’m fairly certain I’ve seen them at previous Knitting & Stitching Shows, but somehow I hadn’t tried their threads before. They are a family business and extremely helpful: when I decided to buy one of their Colour Packs but felt that it needed an extra shade between the dark and the medium blue they had a look at the colours while we were on the phone, then called me back later after they’d had a look in better light and found the right shade to go with the pack. Not only that, when I ordered that extra silk in a different weight from the pack they emailed me to ask whether that order was correct, and when the parcel arrived it included a sample card of their various silks and other threads as a bonus – very good service indeed.

You may think that all this is quite enough silk for anyone, but there has been more silken activity in the Figworthy household. No, I’ve not been growing my own silkworms – we haven’t got a mulberry tree. All will be revealed in the next FoF…

PS – I will admit to feeling slightly uncomfortable about filament silk because the moth is not allowed to hatch; at some point I will have to decide where I stand on that. Spun silk (which is not quite so strong and has a less exuberant sheen but looks beautiful in its own way and is very nice to work with) is made from the shorter remnants of the cocoon that are left after the moth has chewed its way out, and is therefore blissfully unproblematic; it’s not even taking something from the moth that it could conceivably still want (like honey from bees). Definitely the more worry-free silk.

Another trial fabric to use with another book

Posted on 22nd June, 2020 by Flights of Fancy

Some time ago now I got Thread Painting and Silk Shading by Margaret Dier (from the same series as the Lizzy Pye and Becky Quine books). It’s got lots of interesting information and some pretty projects (must try felt padded stitching some time – I’ve used it in goldwork of course, under metallic kid, chipping and cutwork but never under other types of embroidery).

One of them, a small part-padded Japanese flower (there are also some interesting Chinese ones) struck me as perfect to try out two new Empress Mills samples: their Egyptian cotton. They sent me white and natural, and I tried one without and one with backing fabric. Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of the samples when they arrived, so I can only show them with the stitching!

These two little projects also offered a nice opportunity to use different types of silk: a spun silk, overdyed Soie d’Alger (Chameleon Threads’ Shades of Africa), for the un-backed version on natural cotton, and a discontinued flat reeled silk called Eterna on the backed version on white. Spun silk is generally easier to work with than reeled silk, which is made from the continuous silk filament as it comes off the silk worm’s cocoon (and is therefore also known as filament silk); filament silk, especially when it’s a flat silk, will snag on thin air but it has an incredible sheen, whereas the lustre of spun silk is a little more muted.

Chameleon Threads' Shades of Africa overdyed Soie d'Alger

The version without any backing stood up remarkably well to some serious stitching, especially the padding which is worked with 6 strands in the needle, which means that where it doubles up around the eye I was pulling 12 strands through the fabric. In spite of this rough treatment, there were no obvious holes or distortions in the fabric. Thumbs up!

The design drawn onto the natural cotton

On the version with backing I decided I could try an extra layer of padding, as the petals weren’t quite as rounded as I’d hoped and expected with a single layer. Even though the unbacked fabric had taken the full six strands for the padding surprisingly well, I felt that two layers of six strands might be inflicting a bit too much of a challenge on the fabric in spite of the strengthening layer of muslin behind it; on the other hand, adding an extra layer of padding but making both layers less voluminous would rather defeat the purpose. I compromised by using three strands doubled in the needle – I’d still be stitching with six strands, but there wouldn’t be the extra bulk of the tail going through the eye.

Six strands in the needle, twelve strands by the eye

Three doubles dtrands in the needle, six strands by the eye

The extra padding definitely worked to make the outside of the petals more curvaceous and the difference in height towards the centre more noticeable, and with the sheen of the flat silk that shows up even more (although unfortunately it seems to be impossible to capture the effect satisfactorily in a photograph if you’re an amateur). And the fabric behaved beautifully – not surprisingly, as apart from the colour it is exactly the same as the one used for the other flower and it had the added advantage of a backing fabric. The pure white is a bit stark for my taste, so I would probably have the natural-coloured cotton as my default choice.

The first row of long and short stitch in shiny flat silk

A successful experiment then, both because I enjoyed trying out this part-padded embroidery and seeing how it gave a more subtle lift to the petals than complete padding, and because I’ve got another fabric to add to my list of Useful Embroidery Fabrics!

Blue silks dispel the silk blues – now for purples. And greens.

Posted on 23rd March, 2019 by Flights of Fancy

The post was exciting this week, with several blue silks dropping through the letterbox. These are the “why not as they are on offer and I’m bound to use them” Caron silks – aren’t they beautiful?

Colourwise, they would definitely be an option; but if at all possible my preference was still to do the whole project in Soie d’Alger, even though there’s nothing in priniciple against mixing silks. So it was with a sense of anticipation that I opened the envelope from West End Embroidery, with a single skein of Soie d’Alger 4913.

A single skein only, but the sheer relief when it turned out to fit in exactly with the rest of the series, without even a tingle of purple, made me positively giddy!

So now I have my series of three blue silks. In fact, I have a series of four. And that is, of course, fatal, because it means choice. Do I use the three darkest and discard the lightest, or vice versa? How does this fit in with the two other colour runs in the project? Well, here are the four blues together with the three reds and purples which are my current selection. Do you see the problem?

That’s right, when matching the colours by lightness/darkness the gaps don’t line up. My husband’s view was that it needed a lighter red. Well, I just happened to have one!

Much better, true. But what I really want now is a fourth purple to fill the gap, and use the three lighter shades of each colour. The trouble is that those three purples are the entire series of that particular colour. And by now I know from experience that trying to choose a similar series containing at least four shades from the digital Au Ver à Soie shade card is a mispurchase waiting to happen.

And then there are the greens. Not the ones in Soli Deo Gloria, they’re sorted. But I’m thinking of re-using the blues, reds and purples in a Celtic cross together with a series of greens. I’m going to try something facetted rather than the shaded look in the trial colour version below, but even so I’d need at least three and preferably four shades of a bright, warm green.

So back to Yvonne at West End Embroidery, who must be getting fed up with me by now but who is far too polite to show it . I’ll keep you informed!

I’ve got the silk blues

Posted on 20th March, 2019 by Flights of Fancy

I love silks, I do, really. But sometimes when working with them (or trying to work with them!) I hanker after the predictability of DMC stranded cotton. In my project box for Soli Deo Gloria there are some lovely Soie d’Alger silks in reds, purples, yellows, greens and, today’s topic, blues. Here are those blues on the Au Ver à Soie shade card:

And here they are (four of them) in real life. DMC-wise they are similar to 791, 792, 340 and 809 – spot the odd one out.

So I contacted Nelly at Hardanger Atelier and asked if she had a 4913 without the purple cast (and how Au Ver a Soie allowed that dye lot out I will never understand!) – she hadn’t, nor was there any other blue that would go with 4914 and 4916; but she promised to see if there was a series that was like DMC 797/798/799, which would work with my chosen reds and purples.

Meanwhile I considered that not all the silks in a project necessarily have to be the same brand. Rummaging through my collection of silk samples (well, they are full skeins but I mean where I have just a few of a particular brand) to see which were likely to have the same look as Soie d’Alger I realised most of them were hand-dyed and over-dyed silks, and therefore not the solid colours I was looking for. The only suitable solid silk was Caron’s Soie Cristale, which unfortunately I have only in an attractive but irrelevant series of five yellows and oranges. My digital Caron shade card did throw up a series of likely-looking blues, but at about £4.50 a skein it’s rather an expensive gamble.

I went to Sew & So’s website to see whether their catalogue pictures were anything like the shade card I have (this sort of comparison can give valuable extra information about what colour the thread is likely to be when you actually get your hands on it) and would you believe it, they had a Soie Cristale sale on! Not quite half price but jolly nearly. Well, I couldn’t ignore a bit of luck like that could I? So four blue Caron silks (the series minus the lightest one on the shade card) should be on their way to me now. If they turn out not to be quite right for this particular project, they may well be perfect for a bird I have in mind. Or that modern floral design. Or the Celtic cross. Or something.

Trying to cover all my bases, I then remembered West End Embroidery. I’ve bought silks and other threads from them in the past and have always found them very helpful. An email, a very quick reply and a phone call later a non-purple 4913 has been ordered, and I am looking forward to seeing it snuggled up to 4914 and 4916 and hopefully looking like one of the family, as it should. In which case the Soie Cristale will have to be put to some other use. Oh dear .

Incidentally, you may wonder why I didn’t just use the next lightest shade I already had, which as you can see from the picture above does fit in colour-wise with the two darker ones. Well, here’s why:

The sample on the left is two rows each of 4916, 4914 and 4912; the middle sample is 4916, 4916/4914 blended and 4914; the final sample is 4914, 4914/4912 blended and 4912. As you can see, whenever it’s used the 4912 just stands out far too much – in the blended section on the right the two shades don’t really blend at all, they just happened to have been used in the same needle!

It’ll do at a pinch, but this project is rather close to my heart and I want it to be just right! Even if it means building up an impressive collection of blue silks (the sacrifices I make for my art…)

Floral fun (with silk and gold)

Posted on 6th November, 2018 by Flights of Fancy

On a FB group someone posted a video with “embroidery tricks”. Most of them weren’t really tricks at all, just types of stitch, although there was an interesting example of disguising a tear with embroidery. But a little flower caught my imagination – a very simple, small, four-petalled outline filled in quite quickly (yes, I did allow for the speeded-up filming ) with satin stitch, some straight stitches and french knots. This is what it ended up looking like in the video:

Because at no point the needle or the hand of the stitcher was shown, it was difficult to gauge the size, so I drew a similar flower, printed it off in sizes ranging from 2 to 3.5cm and decided on the 3cm one. After completing the first stage it was clear that that was too big (or rather, not small enough), and the one in the video seemed more likely to be the 2.5cm version. (As it happens, it wasn’t – more about that later. What I should have done, of course, was stitch a cluster of one fat French knot with six French knots around it, measure it, and take the size from that.)

As per instructions I started with the white satin stitch, using four strands of Rainbow Gallery Splendor silk (their strands are about the same thickness as DMC). A few points for improvement: according to the video the white stitches should actually have stopped short of the central circle (I went right up to the edge of the circle) and I didn’t get those edges curved enough, especially on the first petal, which is practically straight (blue line). Never mind, learning “curve” .

The purple streaks didn’t present any problems, but when I came to the central circle it soon became clear that there was no way of filling it with only seven French knots. Even with four-strand, three-wrap knots it took eight for the outer circle and three in the middle. OK, so it didn’t look quite like the original – but I was rather pleased with the result anyway!

I did feel it could be improved upon, however. But first I decided to try the 2.5cm version – surely that would be small enough for seven French knots to be sufficient? Well, no. And for some reason the flower also ended up rather elongated horizontally. All in all nice enough, but not as nice as the bigger version, which I felt looked a bit less cramped.

As the smaller flower was the less satisfactory of the two, I wasn’t going to bother with an even smaller version just to see if I could get one whose centre would be completely filled by seven French knots. I returned to the 3cm version, which (although without trying the 3.5cm one I can present no actual evidence of this) seems to be the Goldilocks size. What about giving it some leaves? It looked a bit bare as it was.

I liked the way this framed the flower. But it lacked just that little something… What about the tangle of Jap I was given by my mother-in-law, and which was sitting on the little table by my stitching chair now neatly wound onto a reel? Its gold wrapping suffered slightly in the untangling process, and I will probably never use it for projects which take several weeks to complete or which will be framed, but that makes it just perfect for jazzing up inconsequential little projects like this flower without feeling decadent or wasteful! Incidentally, I’d started calling it The Mini Quatrefoil, and don’t you think that has a sort of gold-rimmed sound to it? It also made for a good opportunity to try out the translucent couching thread I bought at the Knitting & Stitching Show. The Quatrefoil was too small to take the usual double line of Jap, so I worked a single line, around the petals only (it would look too fussy to have the leaves gold-rimmed as well).

When looking at it close up you can see the imperfections in the Jap, but bear in mind that the actual flower is only 3cm high – in real life it really isn’t noticeable. The translucent couching thread was very easy to work with, and is practically invisible – I’ll definitely be using that more often! As for the overall look, I like the way the project has developed away from its video inspiration; and it turns out to be just the right size for some aperture cards I’ve got in stock (left over from an abandoned Christmas card idea several years ago).

As the whole thing takes only a few colours, a small scrap of fabric, and about an evening, that makes it a great last-minute card design, and it would also work well as a travel project. Add to that the fact that you can play around with the colours to create several different-looking flowers to go with all those different shades of card I’ve got, and the Quatrefoil turns out to be a very lucky find. The Serendipitous Quatrefoil – now there’s a grand name for a small flower!

Could you use…?

Posted on 28th September, 2018 by Flights of Fancy

When you are known to be a needleworker, sooner or later you will be asked the question “Could you use…?” The item in question may be a great aunt’s collection of half-finished canvases, threads once bought but never used, inherited patterns, or fabrics, needles, hoops or beads which the owner can’t use anymore because of deteriorating eyesight or increasing arthritis. It often includes a great many things which frankly you will never be able to (or want to) use, but there are gems, too. And knowing other needleworkers means that it is rare for these donations not to find a good home eventually.

Recently a gentleman who came to our house to purchase parts for his pre-war Austin Seven (Mr Figworthy’s main line of business, when he is not assisting Ms Figworthy in attaining world domination in embroidery) noticed the various bits of stitching dotted around the house, and asked The Question. In this case it was what he described as “a bag of designs” that once belonged to his grandmother. Last week he dropped them off, and it turned out to be parts 1 to 34 of a series called Embroidery Magic, complete with all the iron-on patterns and two ring binders. Judging by the style they date back to the 1980s, and I’m going to have fun looking through them and picking things which I may want to stitch before taking them to my various embroidery groups for the ladies there to fight over .

Rather longer ago my mother-in-law gave me a box of unidentified silks on cardboard tubes. So far I haven’t done anything with them, but from the start the colours suggested peacocks to me. I’m now thinking of using them for a split stitch version of the miniature cross stitch peacock I designed for a pendant (the picture shows the anonymous silks at the top, followed by discontinued Eterna silks, Piper silks with a couple of discontinued Filofloss, and Threadworx hand-dyed Vineyard silks).

Or perhaps it could become a miniature-stitching-on-silk-gauze workshop? I have acquired a few inexpensive pendants which I hope will be perfect for that. Now to convince the Knitting & Stitching show that silk gauze embroidery is just what they need on next year’s workshop programme!

The mini peacock in my own silver locket

The original pendant and the possible workshop ones

The miniature peacock fits the new pendant

Variety is the spice of stitching

Posted on 12th August, 2018 by Flights of Fancy

First let me play the sympathy card: I hurt my stitching hand in a fall, so for the past week I’ve done no stitching whatsoever. The last thing I did (and probably shouldn’t have) was finish Forever Frosty last Sunday; after that, nothing. How did I manage to restrain myself, I can hear you think. With difficulty, is the answer, and mostly because of the knowledge that this week I will be attending the 2-day Medieval Embroidery retreat at Coombe Abbey (thank you, oh husband-who-understands-the-desires-of-a-stitcher’s-heart) for which I want to be in good shape. Angela Bishop, one of the tutors, assured me that the retreat is “a combination of demos, talk, stitching (and eating!) so not all stitching”, so there should be plenty to enjoy even if I can’t quite keep up with the other embroiderers in the practical parts.

Of course this enforced stitch-less period comes just when I’ve got about five different projects either in progress or hooped up and ready to go! Some people like to stick to one project at a time, and they have the perseverance, concentration and self-control to stick with that one project until it’s finished (all the more astonishing when it’s one of those fully covered pictures consisting of half a million or so stitches). I, on the other hand, am fickle. I start a project, and half-way through I want to do something different. And that’s with designs which hardly ever exceed 10 inches, and generally aren’t solidly stitched. But in embroidery I will allow myself this fickleness – it is, after all, my hobby, which I’m meant to enjoy! And so I gather around me many different projects, preferably in different styles or techniques, and stitch whichever of them appeals to me at any given time. So what projects am I surrounded by at the moment? Here they are, in no particular order.

Line sampler project pouch. This was inspired by pictures posted on the Mary Corbet Facebook group by a lady who stitched line samplers in the shape of hearts and letters. I had just bought a couple of stitchable pouches meant for large tablets, which I think will work very well as travel cases for small-to-medium embroidery projects. Because I find it very difficult to be completely random in my stitching, and because I sometimes need a quick reminder of stitches that I don’t use very frequently, I’ve printed out a list of my stitch diagrams suitable for stitching lines. The letters will be worked in five different colour combinations, each based on and outlined in a shade of Anchor Multicolor.

Carousel, a Hardanger design. After lots of freestyle and other embroidery I decided it was time to get back into Hardanger, and to ease myself into it I started with the non-cut designs of Veiled Delights. This was both a good idea (simple motifs) and a bad one (stitching through organza is predictably less easy and relaxed than stitching straight onto the evenweave), but on the whole I think it did re-ignite my enthusiasm for Hardanger, so I have hooped up a proper Hardanger design with cutting and filling stitches and everything. It’s called Carousel because many stitches in it have a “whirly” quality to them. I had various colour combinations in mind, and may well stitch it in other colours besides this one in the future, but for now it’s bright blues on bright white.

Come Rain, a goldwork umbrella. And yes, there is a Come Shine as well – a parasol. Strictly speaking the umbrella is silverwork, on a teal ground, while the parasol will be done in gold on an orange fabric. Both will have some appliqué as well as a variety of metal threads. I’ve worked out which threads and wires and techniques I want to use where, but only while I’m stitching will I be able to decide which sizes will work best (it wasn’t until I was actually stitching Forever Frosty that I realised the pearl purl I’d chosen for outlining his body was far too thin). This is the one that’s really calling to me at the moment – perhaps I can make a start next weekend.

Soli Deo Gloria, a silk & gold flower. I was so taken with the combination of colours and materials I used for my interpretation of a Kelly Fletcher freebie that I designed a flower of my own to work in those colours and techniques. As I was putting this together I decided on different silks, and possibly some of the gold threads will be slightly different too, but the look and feel of it will, I hope, be the same. I called it Soli Deo Gloria (“glory to God alone”) because the colours of the petals and the use of goldwork threads were originally suggested by a Bible verse about furnishings made for the Tabernacle: “They hammered out thin sheets of gold and cut strands to be worked into the blue, purple and scarlet yarn and fine linen – the work of skilled hands” (Exodus 39:3).

And finally, a Kelly Fletcher design on a tea towel. You may remember the Classic Creations kit I got a while ago; it comes with fabric for two of the twelve designs, and as I was looking for a suitable fabric for the others I came across some tea towels and napkins I bought as “postage filler” when ordering shopping bags from the Clever Baggers. A tea cup seemed a suitable design for a tea towel, so I’ve ironed on the transfer, making sure it’s far enough from the corner for me to get a hoop around it (I cannot stitch comfortably without a hoop). I will have to remember to finish everything off very securely (not usually a priority when most of my projects end up in cards, coasters or boxes), and keep the back neat (likewise)!

And what about you? Are you strictly faithful to one project from start to finish? Or do you lavish your affections on many different designs? If so, do you work on them according to a strict rotation or do you stitch whatever takes your fancy? Whatever your ways and methods, enjoy your stitching. I hope to be enjoying mine again in a few days’ time!

The woes of a multiple starter

Posted on 27th March, 2018 by Flights of Fancy

Originally I was going to call this post “The woes of a serial starter”, but then I realised that if only my starts were serial, there wouldn’t be a problem. It’s because they are concurrent that I get into trouble, and that trouble is summed up in the question “which one do I work on this evening?”

From fairly early on in my embroidery life I found that one project at a time didn’t do it for me. All right, I get bored easily. I am not the work-on-the-same-enormous-project-for-three-years-running type. Quite a steady and patient sort of person in everyday life, I somehow seem to crave variation and instant gratification in my needlework. Oh well, one has to get one’s excitement somewhere .

And on the whole, it works just fine. If I have two or three things on the go, and they are not too similar, I can pick up whichever I feel like at any given moment. I may work on the same project for several days (even weeks) on end, or I may change from one stitching session to the next. But don’t you find sometimes that too much choice can be paralysing? As with flavours of ice cream (so much easier to decide when vanilla, chocolate or strawberry were the only options), so with too wide a selection of available embroidery projects – if there are so many things I could do, I sometimes end up doing none of them and watching Countryfile or a murder mystery instead!

At the moment I find myself with two projects actually being stitched (a Kelly Fletcher design re-imagined in silk and gold and a silk sunflower), two hooped up with the materials chosen (a goldwork workshop model and another sunflower), two transferred with the details still to be decided on (a tiny sheep to be done in silverwork and a project pouch – really a tablet pouch – to be worked in plain DMC), one charted but not yet transferred (a six-petalled flower to be done in silk and gold), and one tantalising me with its possibilities but with no definite stitching plan as yet (a really useful canvas moon bag).

So will I get any stitching done tonight? As Tommy Cooper said, “I used to think I was indecisive. Now I’m not so sure.” Is there a Midsomer Murders on anywhere?

Flights of Fancy

Mabel's musings on anything stitchy

Tag Archives: Silk