Stitch-a-Garden SAL

Posted on October 30, 2022 by craftycreeky

Having finally finished my embroidery of our patio, I’ve just started the next page for my garden book, the top garden where the summerhouse is…

There’s a few bigger features in this part of the garden, such as the summerhouse, the lawn and the pond. There’s also lots of shrubs and small trees such as the osmanthus on the left of the photo and the purple cotinus coggrhia, so I’m hoping it might be a little quicker to stitch.

I’ve chosen the same murky fabric for the background, I’ve no idea why I bought this fabric as to look at it’s actually quite ugly! It’s sort of duck egg blue with brown and green smudges which actually works pretty well for a background. I sketched out the area so I could work out the scale so it will fit on one page. This area is directly above the patio garden so it’s the same depth but it’s wider so I’ve ended up including the main path too, although I might extend a little upwards to show the big fence more and take some off the path…

The black lines are the outline of the design and the page, I’ve used a Frixion pen so a little heat from an iron or a hairdryer and they’ll disappear.

As you can see I’ve added some painted fabric for the grass, the pond and the summerhouse, I’m thinking of adding a bit more paint as the lawn is looking a bit yellow. The pond makes me smile a bit as mine is more vivid green due to duck weed, luckily my stitched garden doesn’t have weeds!

I feel I’m still at the scary white page stage, hopefully once I get a few more shrubs added and get stitching it will start coming together.

This SAL is organised by Avis, we each share our progress on our chosen needlework every three weeks, just long enough to keep me motivated if an embroidery is taking a while! Please follow the links to see what everyone has been stitching.

Avis, Claire, Gun, Christina, Kathy, Margaret, 

Heidi, Jackie, Sunny, Megan, Deborah, Sharon, Daisy, 

AJ, Cathie, Linda, Helen, Connie, Cindy, MaryMargaret

Posted in embroidery, Garden, Stitch-a-long, Stitching my Garden, Textile Books | Tagged , | 11 Comments

Jack Frost

Posted on October 29, 2022 by craftycreeky

One of my most successful purchases from the Harrogate Flower Show has been Brunnera Jack Frost, I bought it quite a number of years ago and it still looks good, It’s a hard working perennial which has sprays of tiny blue flowers in spring and cream and sage green variegated foliage the rest of the time, well apart from deepest winter! It’s a bit like a perennial forget-me-not, but taller and sprightlier…

…and with a more interesting leaf. It now has several babies growing around the garden!

When I was stitching one of the wreath patterns from a mystery bundle from Sookie Soo on instagram I stitched lots of French knots in a variegated blue and it crossed my mind that if you were to make a wreath from Jack Frost, it could look like this…

OK so the leaves aren’t variegated but it is only about 2″ across!

This is one of the embroideries for my garden book, my plan is to do crazy patchwork pages with these little stitchings, interspersing them with the full page embroideries. I decided it was time to start putting some of these pages together,

I rummaged in my fabric stash and found some blues and greens which went nicely with the stitching. I ‘crazy-patch-worked’ them together and started stitching. I added trims, embroidered round them and over them…

…I felt the flowery fabric at the top, whilst very pretty, seemed to dominate the piece. I decided to add some lace over the top. I carefully cut a segment of a doily I bought for 50p in a vintage shop that’s opened in Otley. I then had the idea of running a gimp thread through the lace which I can then extend into the adjoining areas…

This is what I like about crazy patchwork, you can just run with an idea and go with the flow. So I’m planning on couching into the green area and developing it a little more, and the blue corner still needs sorting, but it’s getting there. I think one of the issues with this kind of stitching is knowing when to stop!

Once this one is finished I’ve several more little embroideries to incorporate into my garden book so I think I’ll be busy for a while.

Posted in embroidery, Garden, Textile Books | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Exploding Heart Quilt

Posted on October 28, 2022 by craftycreeky

I’m trying to use my covid house arrest productively, luckily I don’t feel too ill, I’ve had worse colds, so I decided to make a concerted effort to finish the Exploding Heart quilt. This is a wedding present for a wedding that took place in May! The pattern is by Slice of Pi, the colour scheme chosen by the couple was sage green and creams.

Last week I had made a concerted effort to make all the individual blocks, there’s five different pieced blocks, mainly quarter square triangles.

I had already started stitching the rows for the centre heart…

…so I ‘just’ needed to arrange and stitch the surrounding blocks. I’ve made things slightly more complicated for myself by using several different patterned cream fabrics for the background, it would have been much simpler if I’d followed the pattern and used a plain background! It’s just another factor to think about when arranging which block goes where so no blocks of the same fabric are adjoining. I’ve already spotted one pair which are next to each other!

I’m really pleased with it so far, I think the different creams in the background work really well, it was worth the extra head scratching! Now I just have to quilt it.

I’ve just ordered some batting which will hopefully arrive tomorrow, I was pretty sure I had some in my stash but it’s doing a good job of hiding away if I have! I’ve just to decide on quilting patterns and thread colour. I’ve ordered a spool of pale green variegated thread which I’m hoping will work on both the cream and the green.

I’m wanting a fairly simple quilting pattern, when I do free motion machine quilting I tend to do a fairly dense pattern whereas I want something a little more spaced and therefore quicker! I’ve bought a pattern off Etsy which is hearts and a meander which I think will work, however they have sent it in a zip file and I still haven’t managed to open it! I’ll have to get my OH onto it tonight!

Whilst I’m waiting for everything to arrive I might do some dress-making 🙂

Posted in Quilting | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

There is no Planet B

Posted on October 27, 2022 by craftycreeky

I’m a member of Skipton Stitchers, formerly of the Embroiders Guild, every couple of years we hold an exhibition, showing the community our wide range of styles, hopefully encouraging people to take up a needle and thread and maybe joining our friendly group.

We did have an exhibition planned for 2020 with the theme of There is no Planet B. This obviously got cancelled and when we finally reopened we exhibited stitching we had done in lockdown instead.

This year we decided to hold an exhibition with the ‘There is no Planet B’ title. This covers a wide range of work, for example using recycled textiles or natural world themes. It’s being held this weekend in Skipton at Christchurch.

Unfortunately I can’t be there as my OH and I had planned a weekend in London to meet up with family visiting from Australia. I’ve just tested positive to covid so my plans are scuppered anyway and I’ve been banished to my sewing room!

I do have a few things being exhibited though…

Some people hesitated about including the Stitching Bee Challenge piece (mine is the spiral above) as they felt their stitching wasn’t the usual standard, as in true GBSB fashion we had 1.5 hours to produce something from identical fabric swatches. I argued that just showing amazing and perfect stitching could put people off joining, I know when I was deciding which group to join a nearby group had some stunning work on their website and my thought was that I wasn’t good enough. Hopefully enough people have included their pieces so we can display them together.

So if you are within striking distance of Skipton this weekend, I recommend a visit, I think there’s a £2 entrance fee just to help us cover costs but there is some beautiful and very varied work on show.

Posted in embroidery, Skipton Stitchers | Tagged , , | 11 Comments

Moon gazing.

Posted on October 26, 2022 by craftycreeky

We went to see the moon at Bolton Abbey on Monday, well to be precise we went to see Luke Jerram’s Museum of the Moon.

I happened to see a photo on facebook of the moon and thought it looked worth a visit, it was! The moon is a 7m inflatable sphere made of 120 NASA photos to make a model of the moon. It was hung in the Priory church at Bolton Abbey and it was amazing to see.

It meant we could also see ‘the dark side of the moon’, we googled the features of the moon so we could identify all the various seas on the moon, I didn’t realise there were so many. We could also identify some of the bigger craters.

Apparently the seas are not seas at all, just giant plains created by asteroid strikes and volcanic activity

It did make me wonder…and this may sound a silly question…but do those of you who live down under see the moon the other way up!!!

After our moon gazing we walked along the River Wharfe as far as the Strid, this is where the river narrows to a very narrow gorge. The autumn colours were lovely, though it was somewhat busier than I expected as it’s half term week for schools so there were lots of kiddies doing a pumpkin trail.

The moon is a travelling exhibition covering several countries, so if you fancy a visit or just learning more about it just follow the link to the website. It’s going to be at Bolton Abbey until October 31st.

Altogether we walked about 6.5 miles, a comfortable distance at the moment.

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David Austin Roses

Posted on October 20, 2022 by craftycreeky

I’ve just finished my embroidery of some of the David Austin roses in my garden…I have quite a few!

David Austin started breeding roses back in 1961 and he managed to breed roses which both looked beautiful and had a strong scent, but also repeat flowered, there wasn’t just a flush in June. I still have roses flowering in my garden now in mid October.

Buttercup Rose
Lady Emma Hamilton
Champagne Moments

I’m making an embroidered book about our garden so I decided to embroider a page about the various different roses we have. I love all the different names of the roses, A Lark Ascending, This Scepter’d Isle, Gentle Hermione… I decided to do like a wheel of rose names with an embroidered rose towards the middle.

Initially I was just planning to write the names on the fabric with a sepia coloured pen. Unfortunately the pen I tried first, despite a test run, was clearly too heavy, however I’d already spent considerable time stitching the wheel shape so I wasn’t going to start again…

I decided to embroider all the words with back-stitch. You can see on the working progress photo below how Desdemona (at 3 o’clock) is heavier than the others

I stitched the roses first using bullion knots and sometimes a French knot or three in the middle, depending on how open the rose is.

I decided to stitch the names in the same colour as the leaves. I just picked some random shades of green for the foliage, I decided not to try and match it to the real thing as it was just going to get too complicated. It also worked well as I stitched the leaves and then the name, rather than settling down to stitch all the names in the same colour at the end.

Desdemona still shows up heavier but I don’t think it’s quite so obvious and I do like the idea that my hand writing is stitched into the book. It would have looked slightly better I think if I had written the names on the left side the other way round so they weren’t upside down but that would have been quite tricky, working out how long a name will be so that you start it in the right place to get them all finishing neatly in the middle…you get the drift!

A good press removed all the Frixion pen marks and I’m really pleased with the piece.

Posted in embroidery, Garden, Serendipity, Stitching my Garden, Textile Books | Tagged , , | 7 Comments

Exploding Hearts

Posted on October 19, 2022 by craftycreeky

Over the last two to three weeks I’ve been working on a new quilt, I should have started it ages ago, it’s a wedding present for the young couple who married in May! In my defence I only got the colour preferences about a month before the wedding so there was no chance of having it made in time for the big day…and well the weeks and months pass by! I’m not very good without a deadline!

The bride and groom asked for sage green and creams. There didn’t seem to be much selection of greens in the local shops so I ordered a few fat quarters on line. It’s amazing how different two fabrics called sage green can be! Colour is very subjective, hopefully the end result will be sage green enough! I was pleased with the creams though which were mainly I think from B&M fabrics in Leeds, two have lots of hearts on and the more golden one has the words ‘threaded with love’ on. Very apt I thought!

For a pattern I chose one called Exploding Heart by Slice of Pi. With hindsight I might have been better choosing one which wasn’t quite so labour intensive but it’s a design which I’ve admired for a while. There’s lots of half square triangles and quarter square triangles, I started making the ones for the centre heart first which actually worked out better than I thought as I fairly quickly realised the centre squares needed to be in the darker shades of green with a few of the more gold ones interspersed. I’ve arranged them on my design wall and started stitching the rows across. How ever much you look at a quilt before you stitch it, there’s always one a little wrong that you don’t notice, I’ve spotted two triangles the same colour already but they’re staying!

Some of the fabric designs may seem pretty random but there was thought behind it! The bride is from a farming family, she’s spent many a happy day on her grandad’s and uncle’s farm, so there’s a grey/sage with farm animals on, another has cats on as they have two cats, another one is actually Gruffalo fabric but it’s a perfect sage green and I like the little pops of orange, they reminded me of her beautiful red hair. There’s a cream one with lines of music on too as she plays the saxophone very well.

Once I’d pieced the main heart I decided I needed to just settle down and make all the other blocks before I try and arrange them. There’s five different variations of pieced blocks, depending on how many cream triangles and how many green. It’s taken a while but I think I now have all the squares made, I have several piles on my cutting table!

I love how the sheep is peeping out of the block!

It’s a fair-sized quilt, about 72″ square when finished, so it’s not going to be easy to arrange them all as that’s bigger than my design wall! I might have to resort to the floor for the outer blocks, but hopefully soon I’ll be able to show you a finished top.

Posted in Quilting | Tagged , , | 1 Comment

Staying Home HQAL

Posted on October 16, 2022 by craftycreeky

Well I’ve finally started quilting the sashings so it does feel like I’ve made some real progress this week, even though it was only a couple of evenings…

Three weeks ago I had sussed out how to quilt the house blocks, I made the windows bigger and also whip-stitched the quilting line. The main pieces of the houses are stitched in the ditch so although the quilting lines are hidden in the seam you still get the effect of quilting.

I’ve been prevaricating since I started the quilting how to do the sashings, they’re quite wide as there’s the 2″ borders round each block and then the 2″ squares in between. I liked the idea of hearts as I think it nicely links in with the Staying Home name of the quilt, ‘Home is where the Heart’ is and all that.

I folded a sheet of A4 paper in half three times to get a 1/8th segment and cut half a heart out free hand, leaving me with a circle of four hearts. I could then check it size-wise against the quilt and trim it accordingly. I’ve used a Frixion pen to trace round the hearts but just with dots or dashes, I’m still wary of pens on fabric even if they are meant to disappear!

I quilted two sets of hearts and then decided to add another two hearts to fill the gap in between. I’m still not sure if I have the spacing right for these two but I think it will stay pretty much as it is.

So I think I’ve quilted three houses, two embroidered blocks and one strip of hearts…so quite a bit to do still but as it’s a 25 block quilt it’s not an overwhelming amount!!In fact looking at the photo below of the quilt before I sandwiched it it’s quite encouraging, almost a line quilted!! Maybe I should aim for that next time I post, at least a full line quilted!

Hand Quilt Along Links

This Hand Quilt Along is an opportunity for hand quilters and piecers to share and motivate one another. We post every three weeks, to show our progress and encourage one another.  If you have a hand quilting project and would like to join our group contact Kathy at the link below.Kathy, Margaret, Deb, Nanette, Sharon, Karrin, Daisy, and  Cathie

I’ll also be linking up with Kathy’s Quilts for Slow Stitching Sunday, please follow the links to see what everyone has been stitching.

Posted in Quilt-a-long, Quilting, Stitch-a-long | Tagged , , | 13 Comments

Stitch a Garden SAL

Posted on October 9, 2022 by craftycreeky

Well I have my dancing shoes on! Last night I finished – ish my stitched patio garden for my fabric book about my garden. I say -ish as I might just put a few more stitches on it…might!

This is the piece that was inspired by the on-line course I did called ‘Stitch – a – garden’ by Nicki Franklyn of the Stitchery. It was an excellent course and gave me lots of ideas about different stitches to use and painting my fabric. I’m sure she’ll be repeating it if any one is interested. The course was aimed at one picture, like a map of the garden, as my walls are full of pictures I decided to make a book instead. As our back garden neatly divides into three areas I’m stitching a map of each one, this is the first!

Three weeks ago I was just finishing stitching the raised bed but I still had a lot of stitching for the border by the conservatory…

I’ve been a busy bee stitching the lower border, adding roses on the big standard rose bush, peonies, brunnera, rhodedendron, hebe, irises, together with several others which nicely fill gaps in. My last few stitches were little seed stitches in variegated brown to just represent the soil, they just help the areas between the plants to look stitched rather than forgotton about.

I wasn’t sure when I started stitching this piece how the perspectives would work out, I have mixed up view points but I think it works, possibly because it is so busy! The main structures are pictured as from above, possibly just above the arch, so the arbour shape is seen and the rose arch is straight across the path, the pots and planters are circles with stitching in the middle. The flowers are pictured as viewed from standing in the patio so they will be sideways on when the page is in the portrait view as it will be in the book. This is the bit I procrastinated most about but I think it works.

The areas where I might just put a few more stitches are the two green bushes, one is a box and the other a eunonymous, so they are just plain green shrubs but I think the eye is drawn to those more than it should be.

I now need to stitch a similar ‘map’ of the beer garden AKA the amber and amethyst garden and the summerhouse garden too with the lawn and the pond. Hopefully they won’t take as long now I vaguely know what I’m doing, this one has taken about four months!

This stitch-a-long is organised by Avis from Stitching by the Sea, we post every three weeks on our own chosen project, just often enough to keep the motivation going. Please follow the links to see what everyone else is stitching.

Avis, Claire, Gun, Constanze, Christina, Kathy, Margaret,

Heidi, Jackie, Sunny, Megan, Deborah, Sharon, Daisy, 

AJ, Cathie, Linda, Helen, Connie, Cindy, MaryMargaret

Posted in embroidery, Garden, Stitch-a-long, Stitching my Garden, Textile Books, Workshops | Tagged , , | 21 Comments

David Austin Roses

Posted on October 8, 2022 by craftycreeky

I’ve got rather a lot of David Austin roses in my garden, at a rough estimate I’ve probably got about thirty different roses and about fifty actual rose bushes. David Austin was I think the first rose breeder to mix the repeat flowering of the floribundas with the heavy scent and beauty of the old roses, he calls them English Roses. I love learning the names when I buy a new rose, I’ve often given them as presents too, choosing a name that fits the occasion.

When I was thinking about what to include in my embroidered garden fabric book it seemed obvious to do a page on my roses. I’ve stitched a couple of standard roses and a length that could be a climbing rose…

…however I had an idea to embroider lots of the roses and their names. I pondered for a while about layout but eventually settled on a wheel with the roses radiating out like the spokes of a wheel. Having sketched out my thoughts on paper I chose some heavier weight vintage linen and used a Frixion pen to lightly mark the segments of the circle – I had to buy a protractor specially! Frixion pens are heat erasable so when you iron the fabric the marks disappear. It sounds great but there are potential issues their use on fabric is still up for debate. They are great for marking as it’s a nice fine pen and it does instantly disappear with the heat of an iron. However, the marks will return if the item gets very cold, such as in the hold of an aircraft, people have posted embroideries or quilts only to find all the marks had reappeared in transit. It is also not known what the long term effect on the fabric are, the manufacturers still don’t recommend them for use on fabric, I’ve also heard it said that over time it will rot the fabric. Despite this they are widely used in the quilting and embroidery world. I am planning to use them as little as possible.

Having drawn the grid of 16 segments I used a simple running stitch in a light green to mark them. I chose a sepia coloured gel pen to write all the names of the roses. I would have preferred to have all the names facing upwards, so changing direction half way, however this would mean writing into the circle and all the potential pitfalls of trying to get the word length right. It was much easier to write all the names from the middle outwards. I tried to have a nice gradient of colour round the wheel but I was also thinking of long names going into the longer corners, short ones at the side.

I embroidered the roses using bullion knots in various shades according to the rose portrayed..

My original plan was simply to write the names in the border, however having tested a permanent gel pen on a scrap I started writing Desdemona (right of picture) and immediately realised it was the slightly thicker one. I changed to the thinner pen which did look much better, but Desdemona stood out a mile!

Having thought of various cover-ups for the handwriting I decided to bite the bullet and embroider all the names. I’ve used several different shades of green, I have not tried to match the green with the actual leaf shade on the bush, I’ve just picked a colour out, stitched the leaves and the stem and then used the same shade to back-stitch over the writing. Stitching a leaf and then the name also nicely breaks up the monotony of embroidering over 16 names! I haven’t embroidered Desdemona yet but it’s already looking less obvious.

As you can see I still have half a dozen roses to finish but I’m really pleased so far and Desdemona doesn’t stand out as much all ready. I’m tempted to put a button in the middle, this could eithe be one from my button stash or one covered with a mini embroidery of the David Austion logo.Hopefully by next week I’ll be doing a happy dance!

I’ll be linking up with Kathy’s Quilts on Sunday for Slow Stitching Sunday, please follow the link to see what everyone else has been stitching

Posted in embroidery, Garden, Serendipity, Stitching my Garden | Tagged , , | 21 Comments