I’m trying to have a bit of a clear out in my sewing room, well clear out is probably the wrong word, I’m trying to make some kind of headway into my stash, both of fabric and kits, trying to stitch quicker than I buy!
Several shows ago I bought a kit from Kates Kloths. Kate hand dyes threads, ribbons, fabric, they are beautiful, I usually fall for a little bundle of threads on her stall. She also has kits and I fell for a little box which contains everything to make a slow-stitch, flower filled pair of wooden bobbins, one made into a pin-cushion, one as a stand for a pair of embroidery scissors. This week-end I decided to make them.
First task is to make the backgrounds. Now these a very small embroideries, 8x3cm, so when I had to arrange different textiles on the calico backing, they are very small pieces. There’s some hessian, some thin cotton gauzes and what looks like a scrap of furnishing fabric. All I had to do was a few lines of running stitch to hold it all in place. It’s amazing how the stitching makes it feel like one piece of fabric.
As you can see, next I embroidered stems and grasses with simple straight stitches, first with a medium perle thread, then with a finer one. Then came the fun of embroidering the flowers. The two bobbins are slightly different.
The first one I stitched was the one with foxgloves on. These were stitched with a very loopy thread which was couched on. The purple flowers are made from little circles of hand-dyed silk. The instructions suggested cutting a little square, putting it on the needle and then trimming it to a circle, that certainly made it much less fiddly. These are attached with French knots. There’s some tiny little flower buttons on the foxglove bobbin, these are so small I had to use a beading needle to get through the hole!! . There’s a few green French knots sprinkled in for good measure.
The second bobbin has purple flowers made from little circles of silk but attached with straight stitches and French knot to finish. There’s more French knots to make purple flowers. The leaves on the second one are just made with little scraps of green silk. You can see the gorgeous threads I was stitching with.
With the stitching nearly done, I just had to stitch the strips round the bobbins and then make a pincushion top for one. This is just a circle of card, wadding and a circle of cotton. There’s a lazy-daisy flower in the middle too. This was glued onto the bobbin and left over night with some sellotape strapping. I put a little scrap of fabric over the pincushion to protect it from the sticky tape. The final flourish was to couch the wide green thread round the join.
I think they’re delightful, very pretty and lovely to stitch, probably not very practical but they look very pretty in my sewing room 🙂
