A New Needlecase

Back in January 2017 I was enticed to join and on-line group called 'A Year In Stitches'. The idea of the group was to encourage people to stitch every day. Do I need encouragement to stitch every day? Definitely not, I have been stitching every day for most of my life.

I really didn't need to start anything new, but I did. Everyone in the group appeared to be doing surface stitching of some kind. Well, I am a counted thread/lace kind of person, so I looked in my fabric stash and found a piece of linen that I had bought at a Christmas function with my local stitching group. It was a light pink/mauve colour and had in the packet with it a skein of Waterlilies silk floss that blended. All I needed now was a needle and I could start. But what to do?

My passion is drawn thread work, and for a long time now I had wanted to try some coloured needle weaving. So I began creating the sides of a drawn channel with a 4 sided stitch, using the lovely silk thread that was in with the fabric.

OK, channel edged and drawn, I needed to find some Perle threads that blended to needle weave with. That was easy, I have plenty of left over balls of Perle threads, so enter the blue, pink, and cream.  The coloured needle weaving was fun, and I found it much more practical to run three needles. So much easier than threading & re-threading needles all the time.

The piece grew over time. I added fine borders  that I found in one of my books, decided what to do with corners, and added a black work pattern. With the black work pattern I blended different colours with the silk floss that made it blend in with the needle weaving that  I had done. All the while I kept thinking 'what am I going to do with the piece?'

The piece went on hold while other things took over. Then last year at Stitcher's Plus, we were setting challenges for ourselves for this year. My challenge was to finish some UFO's. So behold, my fist UFO for this year is finished! I have turned my piece into a needle case. I finished the black work stitching, hemmed it with a four sided stitch hem, added some lining and Doctors flannel, then a closure of toggle and loop. There is a hand made twisted cord for the spine with a bottom tassel just to finish it off.

So one UFO done, hopefully nine more will happen over the remainder of the year.