I caught up with the Anne Brooke Bobbin Along challenge last night. Each week she adds a little more stitching to a piece to represent a word, we’ve had layers, rolls. hummock…and a couple of weeks ago it was wrinkle.

Anne gathered up fairly narrow lengths of cotton to make a wrinkly ruff or circle. I tried a couple of different cottons for my piece but they looked too heavy, so I tried organza ribbon and that worked much better for me. I initially also tried placing it round the hummock, but I just couldn’t get it to look right. I then had the idea of stitching it along one of the arcs of rolled fabric and that worked much better. This is going to be a double page spread in my textile book.

Last week the word was Slit, cutting a slit in the fabric, folding the sides back a bit like Cathedral Windows in patchwork, revealing another fabric underneath. I wasn’t sure how a straight slit was going to work in my book of circles, obviously I couldn’t do a curved slit as it would distort the fabric too much. I then had the idea to turn it into a slitty eye, a bit like an owl’s eye, or a reptile. I decided to make it next to the hummock with the two circles slightly overlapping each other.

I used a straight stitch to catch the turnings down and stitch the backing fabric in place at the same time using a subtly variegated quilting cotton. I could then use a blue thread to do two running stitch circles round the slit…

…and I couldn’t resist having a little bee peeping out of the slit 🙂

On Friday we discover the next work to stitch.