Colourful bling for a Welsh cross

My new year’s resolutions aren’t doing too badly after all – I actually finished one of the long-term WIPs! Yes, the third Hannah Dunnett tree is complete, and I am very glad to see the back of it. No, that’s unkind; I do like the tree trio, and it gave me a lot of opportunities for experimenting. But taking the project out of its hoop and placing it in my Finished Projects folder did give me a great deal of satisfaction.

The autumnal tree finished

This meant I could now concentrate on that very-long-term WIP, Llandrindod. Taking it to my weekly embroidery group which started up again last Monday I made progress on the split stitch, and also put in some of the subtle bling. In the Llandrindod project box there are several different sparkly threads, some Petite Treasure Braid, some blending filaments, mostly in pearlescent white. This I hoped would give a little sparkle without drawing too much attention to itself. I decided on the thinner blending filament, on the grounds that if it turned out to be so subtle as to be unnoticeable, I could always overstitch it in the slightly thicker Petite Treasure Braid.

A little bling added to some of the gems

The other ladies at the embroidery group liked the effect, and so did I, but I wasn’t altogether sure I liked it enough. The pearlescent white worked fine on the central diamond, but was it the right thing on the coloured gems? And then I remembered that I had some coloured blending filaments tucked away in a box; a mix of two now discontinued brands, which would normally mean I couldn’t use them for a design that will be available as a chart pack, but fortunately equivalents should be easy to find in Kreinik’s range. Did I have the necessary colours though? I did.

Blending filaments for the coloured gems

Doing a bit of work one evening while Mr F watched a documentary about Pompeii, I managed to finish all the remaining split stitch, and then it was time to see whether the coloured blending filaments would work. Although I have a red, blue, green and purple, the blue and green especially are not an exact match for the silk used to stitch the gems. I therefore decided to try the green gem first – if I like the effect there, it’s safe to assume I’ll like it in the other three gems as well.

Pearl and green blending filament Close-up of the red gem with pearlescent white blending filament Close-up of the green gem with green blending filament

And do I like it? I’m not sure… I’ll leave it for a bit while trying to do some homework for my next Canvaswork class, and come back to it in a week or so to see how the two variations strike me when seen afresh. Meanwhile, feel free to comment and let me know what you think!

PS The close-up picture of the green gem shows that the stitches at the pointy end of the gem are not symmetrical. I will have to do something about that or it will continue to niggle at me!

New year’s resolutions

Happy New Year

The fact that I am wishing you this on 3rd January tells you all you need to know about my success rate with new year’s resolutions. I had fully intended to get FoF back on track after its long hiatus on the first day of the year, but it didn’t happen. Oh well. Better late than never, as they say, and I hope to catch up on all the things that would normally have been posted in the dry spell between the end of last August and now, when instead life and Covid got in the way. This means some of it wont’t be as topical as it might have been, but fortunately goldwork materials, course pictures and Certificate updates don’t really have best before dates. So on with the show, and one resolution that I have kept!

It concerns what some would call UFOs but I prefer to think of as long-term WIPs. My resolution was, not necessarily to finish them, but at least to occasionally put some stitches in. Well, I didn’t want to be too ambitious. And rather to my own surprise, I have actually done some of this occasional stitching! One of the projects to benefit from this is Llandrindod. True, the difference between the progress picture taken in November 2021 and today’s picture is not massive, but it is noticeable – that must count towards the resolution score.

Llandrindod in 2021 Llandrindod in 2024

Another design you may remember is my quartet of Hannah Dunnet-inspired trees that became a trio because I simply couldn’t make one of the trees work. I had also got stuck on the third of the remaining trees, as the padded satin stitch used for the autumnal swirls in its foliage was not doing what I wanted it to do. After unpicking and restitching the red swirl twice I’d decided to leave it and work on things that were more fun. But as I was tidying my craft room I came across the trees and decided to have another go. And what do you know, it worked! The satin stitch slanted nicely around the curves, and I’m happy with the way it looks. Just the other three swirls to go, plus some green French knots in the background, and it will be a WIP no longer.

Where I left the tree Progress!

On the grounds that there is no absolute law which states that new year’s resolutions have to be onerous, I made my second resolution a very easy one to keep: improving my skills by practicing with new projects, and enjoying the process a lot! Although I haven’t put a stitch in yet, I have hooped up the fabric and set out the materials for this lovely RSN online goldwork & silk shading course which Mr Mabel gave me for Christmas. Just looking at it and handling the materials brings me great pleasure! I’m sure I will enjoy it as much as the box making course I did last year (an update on which is one of the FoFs-to-come).

Ready to start the RSN silk shading and goldwork course

I hope all your resolutions are pleasant ones, and that you will have a great time keeping them in 2024!

When there is no itch to stitch

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).

The tree as it was in late July August's progress September's progress

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.

Japanese embroidery book, cover Japanese embroidery book, project pages Japanese embroidery book, project pages

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.

An inspirational dragonfly

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.

Some initial sketches Italian couching on 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…

The printed fabric for two different kits, uncut

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!

James the Snail's moment of glory is delayed

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.