TAST - feather stitch

I did this piece a while ago - far too busy at work to find any playtime again this week. I do like feather stitch. I used a metallic to feather stitch on the torn strips of organza for kelp, and some rayon stuff for the yellow bushy thing in the middle.

Not much of an effort, and certainly not recent, but I find it so depressing to see another week go by and realise I have barely picked up a needle, that I thought I had to find something in the stash to remind me of the times when I had all day to stitch! Roll on retirement!

I am going to make a concerted effort to finish pieceing the tesselating quilt this weekend. And I want to paint up some cheesecloth to do some embellisher play. If I manage to achieve that much I will be happy, before Monday rolls around again. Although I am on standby to go into work this weekend if necessary - dreading the sound of the mobile ringing as it will only mean one thing.

TAST week 2 - Buttonhole/blanket stitch

Here is my little piece for week 2. Pre-felts embellished onto some upholstery fabric, blanket stitched with three strands of Wildflowers variegated silk thread. I had an offline discussion with Sharon B about the difference between buttonhole and blanket stitch. According to some traditions there isn't any, but to others, there is. This link illustrates it quite well.

http://www.heritageshoppe.com/heritage/stitches/blanketstitch.html

Right at the end of the post it mentions Hedebo embroidery. For more info on that, check here

http://www.bobbinmaker.com/hedebofaq.html

I think I took a lesson in this once - it is very precise (read, tedious!), so naturally, I didn't get very far with it. But a friend of mine was interested in the potential of those little rings, so my husband, who is a woodworker, made her a ring stick like the one illustrated and she made beautiful little 3-D flowers using the end of the stick to fashion little 'cups' which became daffodils - unfortunately she doesn't have a blog (in fact, she does't have a computer!), so I can't show you.

I hope to get a couple of other pieces done later today, but at least I have done something!

BTW I have found upholstery samples to be a good source of backgrounds to embellish on, using my Janome Xpressions - I can pick up big bags of samples from the local furnishings store for a couple of dollars. This one is that sort of faux velvet stuff used in upholstery - the sample pack had a whole range of colours, sort of like a colour wheel, with at least six different shades of green and the pieces are about A4 size, so quite useful.

A late addition to TAST

My husband cooked dinner tonight, so I found time to do that bit of shadow work I wanted - except at the last minute, I decided to do it a bit differently - cut the leaf shape out of silk organza using a fine tipped soldering iron, then backed the fabric with Romeo water soluble and stitched across that. There is a piece of greeny silk behind as backing.

Take a Stitch Tuesday

Well, I dutifully started off by doing a piece on a counted thread base in the traditional sampler format, and nearly DIED of boredom. Now I remember why I don't do cross-stitch - oh, the tedium, put the needle in this hole, bring it out in that one, count how many in between - aaaaaarrrrrggggghhhhh!

As you can see, by the last row, I was really starting to lose it and thought, bugger it, I'll put that needle in and bring it out wherever I damn well want to - so there.

So I think that will be the last of my attempts at the traditional sampler approach.

My next attempt was using herringbone to embellish a watercolour felted background landscape - much preferred this approach. I also wanted to do a piece using herringbone on sheers a la shadow embroidery - but got caught up in preparing a welcome home dinner for the prodigal daughter who just returned from six weeks in the USA - so didn't get to it, but I think I still will.

I wonder what next Tuesday will bring??

I may be going crazy

Well dear reader - flushed with success at my first post, I tried a second today and disaster struck. I won't bore you with the details, but suffice to say that I have spent many hours trawling through Google help (without success), as my blog 'disappeared'. In despair, I created a new one, and thought all would be well, but little did I know...the same thing happened.

I was about to give up on blogging, deciding it was clearly way too complicated, when miraculously, both blogs appeared again, and (as far as I can tell), are now going to let me post further messages.

So, here goes - this will be the third time today I have tried posting this message, or a variation of it, on two different blogs. If this doesn't work, I really am giving up!

This is a bundle of fabric samples that I carefully unpicked from some sample cards I bought more than 10 years ago - those were the days before Internet shopping, when you sent away for actual samples of things - imagine!!

I decided I could put these to good use doing some colour exercises, like the ones I did in Module 1 of Dale Rollerson's Playways - check out The Thread Studio website for more info.

I also plan on maybe using some in the Journal quilts I intend doing during 2007 - more on that later.

In preparation for Take a Stitich Tuesday on Sharon Boggin's website, I have been sorting through my fabrics and threads, and found these two pieces

They were 'play' pieces using a variety of stitches to create texture. I quite like them.

Alright - the moment of truth - I will try and publish this and see where it ends up. Wish me luck.