Crested Chain Stitch

The summer months seem to be flying by and already the days are getting noticeably shorter, yuk! I am trying to make the most of it though, the leisure centre I belong to has an outdoor pool as well as the main pool indoors. I don't swim very well and I started going to try and help my back but the last couple of weeks it has been warm enough to swim outside in the sunshine. Lovely.
I am working on what will either be a present for someone or a UFO depending on how well it turns out and that is taking up most of my sewing time but I have tried the Crested Chain Stitch. It took me a little while as all twisted stitches do but then I got the flow of it and even incorporated it into the piece I am doing. This is the sample for my TAST collection.


As it is also called Spanish coral stitch, I thought flamenco, sunshine and bright colours,(not as bright here as in reality), I also had an excuse to play with my dusters and embellisher for the background.
Sun is shining, Ken has gone to play golf so I am off for, hopefully, a messy morning!!! It's ages since I had the opporunity to paint and dye.

A question of gender?..............

Thanks to Sue Bleiweiss for her generously shared instructions and inspired by the many wonderful ones I have seen on my travels through the blogs I have made my first padfolio, using my favourite dusters and emulsion and ink techniques shared by Purple Missus




Flushed with pride I showed it to my husband who instantly said "it fold the wrong way". I assured him I had it right and showed him pictures, he still insisted it folded the wrong way. When my son came to visit I showed it to him and he agreed with my husband that it folded the wrong way. We came to the conclusion that it is a male/female thing akin to double breasted suits and buttons which go the opposite way round. Strange. So now I will know should I ever make one for a male I must remember to make it fold the other way.

New toy..

These are the results of my two experiments with fuseFX which I bought yesterday
This one is a postcard which I had made

and this one is part of a UFO which now has a new lease of life. I used the fuseFX to trap threads and then ironed it onto the UFO.

Catching up...

Thank you for the welcome back messages they mean a lot. I caught up with two of my friends yesterday. There is something very special about friendship between women, hard to define but it certainly is one of the most precious parts of my life.

I have come back with my head buzzing with things I want to do but don't seem to be able to settle to getting on with things. However I have done one piece for TAST. This is my Butterfly stitch.



As you can see it is a very quick sample but I do like the stitch and can see all kinds of variety for it with different thicknesses and lengths of thread.

Now for Crossed Buttonhole stitch

Palestrina stitch

Another new-to-me stitch this week. I like this stich, great opportunities for variation and texture, once I can stop myself lapsing into buttonhole stitch there is a nice rythmn to it.

I had a search to see what I could find on Palestrina, I knew vaguely that it was a town in Italy. My search turned up this picture of the little hill town near Rome with a quaint custom in June. The gentleman below it its most famous son who rejoices in the wonderful name of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina a composer of church music.


This idea didn't quite come off but I wanted to use the yarn my daughter brought me back from Italy(the thick one).

Just a quickie...

Just a quickie for TAST this week, Knotted Cretan, I can see what a great textural stich this would be, lots of movement too.I quickly needle felted a piece of previously dyed scrim and couched it down with the Knotted cretan with a sparkly thread.

TAST Couching

Some years ago we had a talk at the Embroiderers Guild (unfortunately I can't remember the name of the speaker) which changed my way of looking at portraits. Until that time it had never occurred to me how lovingly the artists had re created the fabrics. Lace, satin, velvet and jewels and more mundane materials were recreated by the artists brush. Since then I have been facscinated by how little dabs of white and grey paint can be a piece of lace or rare pearls. Living near London I am very fortunate, as I have remarked before, to have some wonderful art galleries which are free to pop in and wonder. A little while ago I visited the National Portait Gallery and with my new (Sharon inspired!!) notebook I looked at a postrait I had seen before but this time I tried to capture some of the detail. This is a full size portait of Catherine Parr (the wife who survived Henry VIII) Unfortunately this is a very small image, The detail which fascinated me was the band across the neck of the dress. This is my sketch.(I never said I could draw!)


The thing I couldn't work our was how the circles were made, be carefully looking at the direction of the painted impression of the couching stitches I worked out how the thread must have been laid and this is my impression of a detail of that band.

I used little fly stitches to couch a plaited gold thread.

By the way this is on a piece of duster which I painted and stencilled.

Still dusting.........

Those who know me will fall about laughing at the idea!!

What I mean is that I am still finding things to make and do with my packet of cheap dusters.


No not a postcard





a new needle book! I quite like the accidental background too. I had fogotten that I had put polythene on my work table when I has using my heat gun!

More duster

This is another piece of cheap duster (see below) I have called this one April showers. I needle felted a little bit of silk for the clouds and machine and hand stitched the "rain". The flowers are cotton lace which I painted.

8p dusters

This is the packet of dusters I bought for 99p(about $2 I think),see bird below.
These are some dyed pieces using silk dyes.



and this is a cover for my notebook, (Yes, I now have a notebook, more of a scribble book really but it's a start)
I can take no credit of the lovely shading on these, that came from a piece of rainbow dyed sheer fabric I have been hoarding.




It was really an excercise for me to practice "vermicelli" stitch on the machine. It is getting better but there are still a lot of those nasty little pointy bits.

Question?

Why do we like the needle arts so much? I think this morning , for me, goes a long way to answer the question. After Sharon's round up I went to my workroom to tidy up a bit, after my marathon tidy a couple of weeks ago I don't want it to let it go just yet, (it will happen I'm sure!!) Tidying finished I picked up a piece of cheap duster I had painted. I bought 12 in a packet in the 99p shop because they looked like felt I thought they might be worth experimenting on. So this morning I reached for my new felting needle and I started what was intended to be a sort of landscape. I took the piece to the machine to add a bit of texture with free machine stitching and suddenly there was this bird. I ditched the landscape and went with the bird and here he is, sort of the last swallow. There are two scans because I suddenly realised that the scanner light had caught the bead of his eye and just to see what would happen I re-scanned it the other way round and sure enough it gives him a different expression. Marvellous!