Calendar Piece - "Past Horizons"

Over the last 12 months, my creative stitching group, "Stitchers Plus" , has been working hard to produce a calendar to celebrate our 10th birthday. As it is has now officially been published, and many are now hanging on walls around the world, I thought I would show my contribution.

The piece is called "Past Horizons", and is worked using my own hand dyed fabrics & threads. It was rather a challenge to produce, as the fabric was a dressmaking linen, not an even weave linen. I noticed this as soon as I started counting, and noticed that one side of counting was longer than the other. This got me thinking that it was going to elongate my design too much. So ? What did that matter? It was after all a creative piece. As soon as I started to cut & remove threads, the weft threads started to stretch, another problem that had to be solved, otherwise all my wrapping & needleweaving would be wobbly.

The design is original & has been interpreted from a sketch that I did some years ago of a beach, headland & surf club.

To check out all the calendar, visit here .

TIF Challenge - June

All year Sharon B has been running the TIF Challenge. I had good intentions of completing something every month but things have got a little out of control lately & I have let the TIF challenge slide. I have completed January, February, March & April, but got stuck at May. I have an idea, & got all my fabrics ready to do the challenge, but that is as far as it got. Now the challenges are up for June & July & I am getting further behind.

The June Challenge is about "Stash Busting - Stories That Are & Stories That Are Possible'. So while I have been working on the RR of my previous post, I had to sample a new stitch, and guess what I dug into to do this sample? Da da........ my stash of course! OK, so while I was working the RR sampler, I also started turning my sample into a book mark. It only took me a month to think that this was actually stash busting, and that there is a story behind the stash of fabric and also the thread. So here goes.

About 8 years ago I wanted to make a hardanger sachet, (above) so went about designing it & worked out that I needed a meter of Belfast linen. Any hardanger worker will know that a lot of the designs are worked on the diagonal, and this one was no different. So consequently I had a lot of fabric left from my meter, just odd shapes. The shapes were definately big enough to do something with so they went back into the "Stash" for later use.

About 4 years ago I dug into this "stash "to see if I had enough fabric to make my tissue box cover. Yes! One piece was just enough! The pattern for this was also a strange shape, with funny corners cut out. To do the drawn thread work, I had to withdraw the threads & work the ends back into the fabric. When the piece was finished I had more odd shaped pieces (just smaller than before) , but this time with ends woven back into the fabric. These woven ends can be seen still dangling in the pic below.


OK, some of the pieces are big enough to make small doileys, parts will make book marks & some really small parts might just squeeze in a scissor fob or tassle, so back into the stash they went. It is one of these pieces that I pulled out to sample "single cross eyelets" on for the RR. The sample has since decided to become a book mark.

Then there is the story behind the thread. This story begins also with the meter of fabric and the hardanger sachet. I wanted the stitching to be pink & green , & was game enough to dye my own thread. The problem was that when I dyed it, I wasn't happy with the colour, so wound it all up on empty machine thread reels & placed it in my thread stash. When I started sampling the single cross eyelets, I pulled out this thread from my stash to use, after all it was just going to be a sample.

Now the book mark is nearly finished. It has used fabric & thread from my stash, and combine this with a new stitch to me, I am very happy with the result, even the colour of the thread! So the story began eight years ago with a meter of fabric, and will continue well into the future with many stories to come. The book mark will mark my place in many of the novels that I like to read before going to sleep, as well as references to new & wonderful stitches that I want to try.

A New Major Work

It has been over a week since I posted anything here, so I though I would give you all a teaser as to my next major piece for the Stitches Plus Group. The linen pictured here is one which I hand dyed last week, along with the perle 12 thread on the white reel. The linen is one which I purchased cheap about 2 years ago. I knew it had a stain on it, (I thought that was the reason why it was cheap!) so I avoided the stained piece when I put it in the dye pot. Over the last few days I have started stitching on this piece & have found that it is not an evenweave linen, (another reason why it would be cheap). This now leaves me in a delema, whether to continue stitching & see where the uneven weave will take me, adjust the stitching to make it uneven, so counteracting the uneveness of the weave in the linen, or start again on a new piece of linen, which I know will be even weave & give me what I want. Decisions, decisions!

A Summer Sanctuary

My latest finished work finally revealed. It has been finished for some time but I have held of posting it until now. It is on exhibition at present at the NSW Embroiderer's Guild "A Gathering Of Threads" exhibition. The exhibition opens today at Olympic Park, Homebush, in Sydney & runs until Sunday.

The piece was a challenge in which we had a specific size & base to work to & had to include some metallic gold. What we did after that was up to us. There were 9 of us in the challenge & it will be interesting to see them all hung together, as they will be all so different.

I have used hand dyed fabric, with Drawn Thread, Patchwork, Cross stitch & Surface Stitching. The piece is in two layers. The underneath layer is patchworked together, while the upper layer is drawn, surface stiched & cross stitched. Hand dyed fabrics are used in both layers.

First Reticella Piece

I have been playing with a few pieces of stitching lately, one of which is this piece of Reticella. I have always gone weak at the knees when I have seen pictures of this type of work in books. The technique is very old & dates back to the 1400's.

This has been worked by withdrawing threads from a piece of linen, then filling the resulting holes with needlelace. I think there are some books out there that describe Reticella as purely needlelace, but the earliest forms were made this way. I can understand why it quickly evolved into all needlelace, as to buy this type of fabric is $80/m, only to throw most of it in the bin as we create the holes. Funny isn't it, but the journey of learning & creating is worth every $ I have spent.

Should be finished soon, then to decide what to do with it. Mmmmmm more food for thought.

Band RR book Cover

Since I came back home I have been working on a book cover for the band RR. It has been digitized and stitched out on my sewing machine onto hand dyed calico.

I started working on this last year and I was trying to achieve a blackwork look by machine. It sort of worked but the positions of the stitches leave a little to be desired and to change that I would have to change the whole outline of the letters. That would mean basically starting from scratch and I did not want to do that.

It was done on my Artista program & I have a lot of learning to do on that one!

Stitching Sisters Band Sampler

Even though I have been away on holidays it doesn't mean I neglected my stitching. This is for a Counted Band Sampler Round Robin I have joined in with an on-line stitching group for the next 18 months. There are 9 of us in it with two months given to stitch our bands.

I have decided that each band will be of my own design and hopefully stretch me in some way.

This one is my own designs and it is the first time I have done one of the filling stitches. It also gave me a chance to practice my doves eyes that I learnt last year and realize that I need to practice my picots.

The threads are also some of my own hand dyed ones.