thecraftycreek

These Fridays come round awfully quickly! Today’s theme set by Postcard from Gibraltar is ‘reflective‘. Follow the link to see more reflections!

Catbells is a bit of a recurring theme in my embroideries, it’s my favorite mountain in the Lake District. I’ve lots of photos of it reflecting in Derwentwater and they’ve come in useful as inspiration for various projects. This was a postcard block for Kate’s Signed, Tealed & Delivered quilt.

The shisha mirrors on this embroidery really reflect the light and shine like stars, which is lucky seen as it was for a travelling sketchbook on Astronomy!

Catbells again! This was for the Sisterhood of the Travelling Sketchbook, an international one I was involved in a couple of years ago.

This is the River Wharfe in Otley where I live. It was Otley Show day, hence all the marquees. It was a beautiful morning as I made my way down with my entries.

A more moody view, this is Ullswater in the Lakes, rain was coming down the valley but the sun shine was doing it’s best and reflecting on the lake.

Catbells again!! I told you it was a recurring theme! This was the first embroidery I did of Catbells, as you can see it was used to cover my travelling sketchbook on the theme of mountains.

It’ll be Christmas before we know it!! I always make an Advent ring, I love seeing the candle light reflecting on the stained glass window between our dining room and hall.

The beady-eyed ones amongst you may remember this from last week (steps theme) this week it’s for the beautiful reflection of Bolton Abbey in the River Wharfe.

This is a jelly roll race quilt I made for a friend in greens and purples, moorland colours to reflect our love of walking.

And finally a wedding cake I made for a friend a couple of years ago. I made white roses and cherry blossom to reflect the interests of the happy couple, Yorkshire where she was born and Japan which he loves.

Have a good weekend 🙂

One of my longer term projects at the moment is a stitch sampler, I started it about 15 months ago with the idea of learning lots of new stitches and having a record of them to remind me. I’ve made it a bit more of a journal by adding special days or place-names of where I’ve stitched pages, I’ve also used a different DMC variegated thread for each one and a selection of permin evenweave linens, which is where I think my problem has arisen…

I’m pretty sure they are all Permin as the first two I stitched look like the same colour I stitched the Lizzie Stitching Wallet in, which was called French Lace and the rest are definitely left from my Tall Square Etui box.. Each double page page is 90 stitches by 130 stitches, edged with back-stitch ready for me to whip-stitch them together.

Over the last month I’ve started stitching them together, my original idea was to add tiny beads as I go, luckily I abandoned this idea in favour of finishing the book! Fortunately I also started in the middle, the pages are in chronological order so I double checked the order of pages. I added some interfacing to the pages just to give them a bit of body and then whip-stitched along, the 5 and 10 stitch markers I added came in very useful in keeping the pages aligned. I stopped a few stitches from the centre to give a little movement, though I might stitch these a bit close later.

My problem came when I tried to stitch the first two pages on, which were stitched I think on the French Lace Permin. They were too big!!! My first thought was that I’d mis-counted. I double checked and they were definitely 90 by 130 stitches. I wondered if I had bought 28 count in error instead of 32 count, no it was 32 count. When I looked more closely (two double page spreads are the same fabric) the pages were the correct size across, it was only the vertical side that was too big. It’s quite a difference too, about 5-6mm.

The only logical reason I could think of is that the weft and the warp are slightly different counts. I’ve just measured a 32 thread square and over an inch there does appear to be one thread difference, which clearly adds up over 90 threads!

The concern I have now is whether this was just a dodgy length, or is this standard, after all, if I was just stitching one big picture I wouldn’t know any different. If it is standard then I need to check with any similar project that I’m always stitching in the same direction!

I’ve just checked the Tall Year Square Etui sides and they fit together!! Phew!

If anyone has any ideas or experience of this, I’d be interested. In the meantime I’ve stitched another back-stitch line (seen on photo above) and reduced the size of the top or bottom margins. I’ve one more page to finish, then just a front an back page and it’s finished, hopefully it will be happy dance time in the next month or so!