Tuesday’s Totter Round the Garden

Posted on August 30, 2022 by craftycreeky

Our house sale fell through a couple of weeks ago when the buyers backed out, we therefore had to back out of the house purchase, fortunately it was just a couple of days after agreeing a price so we hadn’t incurred any legal costs. After a couple of weeks mulling things over and my daughter craftily talking to us both individually and planting a seed of an idea…we have decided to stay put and hopefully get help for the garden, as she pointed out it’s a dormer bungalow so perfect if we get to the age when stairs are difficult as we can live quite happily downstairs as both our bedroom and the main bathroom are downstairs! We’ll look at ways of making the garden safer for me too.

Having neglected the garden somewhat since we agreed the sale, I thought I’d better start some weeding and tidying up at the weekend.

My OH helped weed round the lawn by the pond…

Down by the patio I have a couple of lovely hydrangeas in flower. In the spring I moved two from pots into a newly dug bed. Of course the beautiful pale blue one I bought about five years ago at the Harrogate show looks really healthy…but yet again not a single flower!!! It hasn’t flowered since I bought it!!! However, the gorgeous cream one I bought on Otley market has three stunning blooms, they’re huge…

I’ve another light coloured one in a pot which has several flowers on it too, it’s one of those which fades beautifully…

I’m thinking of moving this one to the raised bed in the autumn. Considering what a dry summer we’ve had, I’m pretty pleased with these, I’m not exactly good at remembering to water plants!

I’ve a couple of late flowering clematis down by the patio which are still covered in flowers, these are both many years old, well probably about 15. This purple one is called Romantica, it fascinates me as some of the flowers have five petals and some just four, I’m pretty sure it’s not just that one has fallen off.

August tends to be a bit of a funny month in a typical English cottage garden, most of the summer flowering plants are past there best and the autumn ones haven’t really come into their own yet. I was pleased to see a little vista from the path across to the big fence has still got lots of interest. The coarse leaved plant at the front with little blue flowers is actually a shrubby clematis, I bought it a few years ago at the Harrogate show, it’s not a shrub you often see for sale here, it’s not the most interesting plant but it fills a gap in late summer.

The pink rose in the foreground is called The Alnwich rose, the pink flowering shrub is a spirea and the white rose further down is called Champagne Moments, we bought these when we got married and they flower their socks off all summer and into the autumn.

It’s been a very dry summer here in the UK, we currently have a hosepipe ban until the reservoirs fill up again. Apparently many mature trees are struggling and dropping their leaves already so it’ll be interesting to see which ones survive the winter. Our black sambuscus on the right is already loosing it’s leaves where as usually it’s leaves don’t drop until mid autumn.

I’ve quite a bit of work to do in the garden now, starting the autumn tidy-up and pulling up the weeds before they set seed. I think I need to discipline myself more to get out in the garden more regularly!

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Stitching Flowers

Posted on August 30, 2022 by craftycreeky

Over the weekend I concentrated on finishing my flower sampler, this is for my textile book about the garden. I’ve been doing an on-line course with Nicki Franklyn frm the stitchery called Stitch-a-Garden and this sampler is one of the things she suggests, it has been a useful exercise in trying out different stitches. Last time I sharde my progress I was about three quarters of the way through…

I stitched some more bullion roses, added some straight ones too which could be veronica or liatris. I’ve used three different shades of pink for the rose bush, I think it works pretty well.

The final set of three samples is flowers using applique and fabric manipulation. The first one is made with hand-dyed silk ribbon, I cut a circle and then stitched it to the calico, scrunching bits up as I went. This is a technique which Nicki showed us. The central purple ones are just circles of silk ribbon stitched with a single seed stitch in the middle, tweaking it a bit to make the flowers a bit more random. The right hand sample was meant to be needle turn applique, the one onthe left is the only one done this way, it’s come out OK int the end but it’s very buly and it was pretty fiddly, the other two are just circles of cotton stitched on with fly stitch. The details of the stitches used for these last ones are all relating to the leaves, I think fish-bone stitch is still my favourite.

This piece will probably go in my book opposite the tree and shrub version. I’ve stitched quite a few little pieces for my book so I probably need to start making them into pages.

Posted in embroidery, Stitching my Garden, Textile Books, Workshops | Tagged , , | 14 Comments

Stitch-a-Garden SAL

Posted on August 28, 2022 by craftycreeky

My garden stitching is coming along nicely, I think before I had a bit of white page syndrome, worrying about how it was going to come out so actually stitching not much at all. Now I’ve got started and it’s coming out how I envisaged, it’s coming on nicely. Three weeks ago I was just really starting the borders, still somewhat hesitant…

Having started with the irises and the clemetis up the canes, I started on pink geraniums which billowed through the gate last year, alchemilla mollis, astrantia, camassia. I added a couple more applique shrubs to be a box and a spirea…

I added a pink rosebush, brunnera Jack Frost, roses over the arch, clematis over the arbour, plants in pots…I really feel it’s coming together and giving the effect I wanted of the cottage garden look.

I think stitching the flower sampler over the last couple of weeks has helped my to branch out a bit with different stitches for different flowers, it’s very easy to stick to the same few comfortable stitches, such as French knots, chain stitch and straight stitch, so the blue veronica in the middle of the top border is bullion knots, the camassia is pistil stitch. I’ve used French knots for the pink and yellow roses but I’ve used 4 strands of thread to make a nice chunky French knot, much more effective than the smaller pink ones over the arbour which I did at the beginning of the project. None of it is horticulturally correct, but it doesn’t matter with this kind of piece, so the spring flowering magnolia stellata is not only in flower with it’s leaves, but at the same time as the roses 🙂

Hopefully now I’ve got going with this it won’t take too long to finish, then I’ve just got the amber and amethyst garden (AKA the beer garden) to do and the top lawn with the summerhouse and the pond to stitch…

If you would like to stitch a garden, this is inspired by an excellent on-line course by Nicki Franklyn from The Stitchery

This SAL is organised by Avis from Stitching by the Sea, we post our progress on our chosen piece every three weeks, it does help to keep me motivated! Please follow the links to see what every one 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, Workshops | Tagged , , | 12 Comments

Skipton Stitchers

Posted on August 25, 2022 by craftycreeky

We had a lovely meeting a Skipton Stitchers, very simple idea but so much fun…

I think it was Sally’s idea, inspired by The Great British Sewing Bee program where they have one and a half hours to recycle a random item into something vaguely wearable.

Sally gave us each an envelope with identical contents, five pieces of fabric, four little buttons and a short length of lace together with a piece of calico. We had ninety minutes to create something…

I decided to rip the fabrics into strips and weave them together, stitching them onto the calico. The darker green patterned fabric was a little bright so I turned it over and used the back. Once I had arranged them all, pieced in places as some lengths were too short, I pinned them onto the calico and stitched a simple back-stitch round to secure everything.

I decided to couch a variegated thread in a circle. I started with the green button in the middle and then just kept going, stitching the buttons as I went a long.

In true Sewing Bee fashion we had regular timing updates…’you’ve got 30 minutes left’…at which point we negotiated unanimously to extend the time by 30 minutes! Everyone entered into the spirit of the challenge, no one went to make coffee or have a comfort break – we were too busy stitching!

I was pretty pleased with mine, it reminded me of the rings of a tree. After we’d finished we gathered them all together, it was amazing how different everyone’s was, we’d all started with identical packs and ended up with a wide variety of ideas. To see all the other entries please follow the link to Skipton Stitchers blog.

If anyone is in a stitching group, I can recommend it as a meeting idea, it was great fun.

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Stitch-a-Garden

Posted on August 23, 2022 by craftycreeky

As part of the stitch-a-garden course Nicki Franklyn from The Stitchery has included little samplers of how to stitch different parts of the garden. I stitched a tree and shrub sampler earlier in the course…

It’s useful to see different ways of representing trees or shrubs and how to add some texture to the stitching.

I’m now working on a flower version. Nicki showed different stitches which could be used to create flowers, I’ve tried on the whole to make them like flowers in our garden. It was a useful exercise which has certainly broadened my repetoire of flower stitches, it’s very easy to just use a few easy ones, such as French knots, chain stitch or straight stitch, stitching this sampler is making me think of other ways to give the effect.

I’m stitching on one of the lovely linens I got in a ‘treasure’ pack from Sookie Soo, I like the texture of these fabrics. I started by stitching the outline to make twelve boxes, then I just started concentrating on one stitch for each block, the squares are just under 2×2″. Nicki uses an old fashioned typewriter to write ‘labels’, I did originally plan to have the writing on little pieces of fabric to stitch on, but I couldn’t get it to look right. In the end I just wrote on the square as neatly as I could in a sepia coloured finepoint pen. I still haven’t decided whether to stitch over the title square.

This is the row I’m working on at the moment. I particularly liked the woven wheels and the stem stitch flowers. I’ve not come across stem stitch flowers before but they’re much quicker than bullion knots and really effective. As you can see I’ve a few more bullion knots to do, I’ll do some straight too a bit like veronicas or liatris.

I’ve then got one more row to do, there’s a couple of ways using applique and I thought I might do some raised picot stich, unless someone thinks of another stitch to try.

Posted in embroidery, Stitching my Garden, Workshops | Tagged , | 2 Comments

Merging Workshops

Posted on August 22, 2022 by craftycreeky

We’ve had a busy couple of weeks here, hence very few posts! Our house sale has fallen through as our buyers pulled out, luckily before we had incurred costs for purchasing the one we wanted! Other countries seem to have much better systems for house purchase than our protracted method here in the UK which only seems to benefit the solicitors! Up to the point at which contracts are exchanged any side can back out or try and negociate further, this can be the day before the house move is arranged!!…and people wonder why it is so stressful!

Anyway, we have decided to take it off the market for the time being, do some jobs on it over the winter and relaunch it in the spring. It does frustrate me that these days people won’t see beyond the current decor, they want it show room perfect for them too move in, then they wonder why prices are ever rising. As an example, when we sold my mothers bungalow, we had it valued but then painted it all magnolia, put some new carpets down, spent a total of £2000 and the value was increased by £20,000!!!

My daughter finally had a graduation ceremony, two and a half years late due to covid. Definitely a proud mum moment, even more so as we both had me-made dresses on, Helen probably makes more clothes than me at the moment!…

We came home from the graduation weekend to welcome my stepson home for a week, he lives in Sydney so we hadn’t seen him since pre-covid. We didn’t do much, it was just lovely to chill out together, even if his corny jokes haven’t improved with age!!

All in all, a busy couple of weeks! I did manage to squeeze a little sewing in though…

I’m working on two on-line courses at the moment, the cartography embroidery with Zara Day and Stitch a garden with Nicki from The Stitchery. I found a way of combining the two courses. I’d already decided my Stitch-a-garden piece was going to be a textile book of our garden, this was decided before we decided to move but has become a bit more special even with the delay until the spring.

The latest piece of work with the cartography course was to combine patchwork and machine embroidery to make a map. One difficulty everyone has found with this course is finding a map to use as a basis for the stitching. It needs the scale and detail to be right and ideally be somewhere that means something. So far I’ve done maps of West Witton where my mum had a cottage, the Yorkshire Dales, Catbells (of course)…

Our next piece was more of a street map, I decided to do a map of our street which I can then include in my garden book. I needed a patchwork type background so I had a rummage through my stash and found four fabrics which I felt worked well together. They also seemed fairly apt, the purple/grey one has deer on which we occasionally see on the back lane or in the field behind, the green one is leafy, the blue one has flowers and birds and the brown one has beech masts on, all fitting in with the garden theme.

I traced a map of our estate with standard tracing paper. I included the houses but not the garages as that got too complicated. I was originally planning to trace it onto the fabric the traditional way, but I decided it would be difficult to get the tracing to show up. Instead I pinned the tracing over the fabric and stitched through it, just following the lines with my sewing machine. As it was mainly straight lines, albeit short ones, I used a walking foot rather than a free motion machine foot. I was a little concerned how easy or not it would be to remove the paper after I’d stitched it but actually it came away more easily than tissue paper. It was fiddly to stitch but I’m pretty pleased with how it’s come out. I added the flower button to mark our house.

For my final piece I’m planning to stitch a map of the garden, I am currently stitching the patio area for my book, planning to do an embroidery for each main area. I thought a map would bring the areas together, give it a bit of context. I’m too late for the ‘final exhibition’ of the course but I’ll send Zara a photo once it’s complete.

Posted in embroidery, Stitch-a-long, Stitching my Garden, Textile Books, Workshops | Tagged , , , | 7 Comments

Staying Home HQAL

Posted on August 14, 2022 by craftycreeky

We’ve had a busy few weeks recently, we’ve accepted an offer on our house and we’ve found somewhere to move to. On Friday we found out our offer has been accepted which is a huge relief! The housing market here in the UK is not easy to negotiate round at the moment, house sales have slowed slightly, which is good, houses are tending to sell in a few weeks, rather than a few days but there still seems little point in even looking until you have a buyer. When you do have a buyer there’s not a lot on the market!

We’ve found a house in the village next to Otley called Burley in Wharfedale, the house is big enough for us, room to extend if we want to and the garden is a nice size and flat!! Fingers crossed everything goes through OK!!

This preamble is another way of saying I haven’t managed to do any hand quilting over the last three weeks!! it’s also been too warm to sit under a quilt in the evening, so my staying home quilt is still sitting patiently in the lounge waiting for me to pick it up and start quilting…

I still haven’t quite decided whether to quilt round the houses or not. With the cat block I’ve shadow quilted round the applique, these embroidered blocks will have to be quilted on an individual basis depending on the layout of the design. With the houses I could either stitch just inside the seams of the house or stitch in the ditch round the houses, which is not the easiest to get neat, but I could then quilt windows and round the door…however I’m conscious there are a lot of houses if I start something more time consuming!

Hopefully next time I post about this quilt in September I’ll have managed to do a little quilting and come to some design conclusions, though I might be knee deep in packing by then!

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. We are pleased to welcome Cathie into our little HQAL this week, please follow the links to see what everyone else has been quilting. 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, Cathie and Tracy

Posted in Quilt-a-long | Tagged , | 11 Comments

Stitch-a-Garden SAL

Posted on August 7, 2022 by craftycreeky

I’ve finally made a bit more progress on my garden stitching, not a huge amount as I’m still a bit hesitant on how I’m going to get the effect I want. Three weeks ago on my last SAL post I’d started embroidering the applique bushes…

The perspective of the piece was still making me procrastinate even more, having designed the piece as if above the arch, if I stuck true to the view then things like the bird bath would be just circles, which way do I embroider plants such as irises…

There has to be an element of artistic license in projects such as this, so I’ve decided to portray the borders as if you’re standing on the patio. I’m working my way through a set of on-line lessons from Nicki of The Stitchery, the course is called Stitch-a-Garden, it’s been a lovely course as she’s sort of felt her way along the lesson format as she has been stitching her piece based on Beatrix Potter’s garden. I was very encouraged when I saw how she had stitched a flower border as a profusion of plants is what I’m aiming for here.

Last week I tried a bit of water colour painting on fabric to colour the background a bit, this was the embroidery representing a huge pink geranium which up until this spring was next to the arch and behind the gate…

Encouraged by the effect I decided to paint the border areas of the patio garden. I used several shades of green and allowed them to mix and merge together. They bled a little beyond the outer row of stitching but I was fine with that as the borders of my garden do overflow somewhat! I’m really pleased with how the painting came out, it just softens it nicely.

As you can see I have finally started stitching the plants. The blue irises round the birdbath are just straight stitch leaves and then a loose fly stitch for the flower. The obelisk of canes is just four long straight stitches which I then couched down as I was stitching the twining stems. The little blue clematis flowers are tiny straight stitches, like a little star, although I have realised since that although I have several blue clematis like that, the actual clematis here is more pink!!

I’ve added a trunk and branches to the magnolia stellata and a few flowers. This is another bit of artistic license as magnolias flower before the leaves appear, but at least it identifies it as the magnolia! I have stitched a magnolia with the bare branches earlier in the year for the garden textile book…

I think I need to look back at Nicki’s flower border again for more ideas (and confidence!) but I’m pleased with it so far. Hopefully by the time I’ve finished this one I’ll have got the knack of stitching all the flowers and the other two areas of the garden won’t take as long!

This stitch-a-long is organised by Avis from Stitching by the Sea, please follow the links to see what everyone else has been stitching.

Avis, Claire, Gun, Constanze, Christina, Kathy, Margaret, Heidi, Jackie, Sunny, 

Megan, Deborah, Sharon, Daisy, AJ, Cathie, Linda, Helen, Connie, Cindy

Posted in embroidery, Garden, Stitch-a-long, Stitching my Garden, Textile Books, Workshops | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

Stitching Maps

Posted on August 4, 2022 by craftycreeky

I started an on line embroidery course with Zara Day a few weeks ago on cartography, I love looking at maps and I’ve a couple of ideas rumbling round my head of embroidered maps, so hopefully this will give me a kick start.

I’m a little behind at the moment as the lessons are weekly and I’ve a lot going on at the moment at home but this week I’ve managed to do a bit of catching up. Each week we try a different way of embroidering maps, from stitching on the actual paper to hand-stitching contour lines. These are the ‘maps’ I’ve stitched in the first couple of weeks…

The third lesson was ideas for stitching contour lines, making more of a geological map than the road maps of the previous pieces. Most of us seem to be finding the most difficult bit of this course is finding a suitable map to the scale or detail we require, together with finding an area personal to us but with enough variety on it to be interesting to stitch.

Of course my first thought was Catbells, I’ve stitch this fell many times but always as an outline shape, rather than the contours of a map. I found an OS map on line which I could adjust to the size I wanted, rather than tracing the ones I have at home. I made my map slightly smaller, just so I could get the areas of interest on whilst not being too big and taking forever to stitch.

The four squares I chose included Catbells and Derwentwater. I decided to paint the background with silk paints. I added aloe vera gel as an experiment to see if it stopped the silk paint from spreading. It did, though it didn’t go on quite as smoothly as I would have liked.

I embroidered the main contour lines, on the map there’s another four fine ones in between each of these which would clearly have been too much on this scale. I used a single thread of DMC and back-stitch. I tried to keep as much as possible to the colours on an OS map, so the footpaths are in green running stitch, different stitch lengths denoting the size of the path. The road is in yellow and the route of the Derwentwater launches is in dark grey. I included the blue grid markings too which help to frame it whilst allowing the map to extend a bit further. To give you an idea of scale, the four boxes measure just under three inches.

I’m pretty pleased with this one as a practise piece.

The next lesson was about using quilting to stitch a map. One idea I’ve had mulling about for a couple of years is to embroider a map of the Yorkshire Dales, with not just the main valleys such as Wharfedale, Wensleydale and Swaledale, but all the little side valleys such as Langstrothdale or Bishopdale. Whist my idea is for quite a big embroidery, I decided to do a mini version.

I found a map which showed the rivers and dales, I traced the rivers and then used a light box to transfer the tracing onto some calico. I didn’t want a plain calico background so I had a rummage in one of my stash boxes and found some lovely organza in shades of green and purple, perfect!

I sandwiched the fabrics together with some batting and a calico back and used free motion quilting to outline the rivers in a variegated blue thread. I went over the lines a second time to make them a bit heavier.

My original thought was that the quilting of the river courses would provide me with the valley and fell in relief, a sort of 3D map, however there just wasn’t enough stitching so I decided to do some ‘contour’ lines in green. Here artistic license took over, as I didn’t want to start trying to trace and transfer lots of contours…so I made them up! I like the effect of the organza and the quilting on this piece, it’s certainly given me food for thought when I finally get round to stitching the dales…

I learnt a little interesting fact a couple of weeks ago about the river Wharfe which runs through Otley. On my map it’s the one which goes from the middle to about 4 o’clock. It’s the fastest rising and fastest falling river in Europe apparently.

I haven’t quite decided what I’m going to do with these maps yet, maybe I’ll put them all together in a fabric atlas of my favourite places!

Posted in embroidery, Quilting, Workshops | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments

Garden Stitching

Posted on August 2, 2022 by craftycreeky

I’ve been busy stitching over the last week, just haven’t quite got round to writing about it. I’ve stitched another couple of little embroideries for my garden book. These are both from the mystery bundle I bought from Soukie Soo, she draws pretty little designs onto vintage linen with a heat erasable pen which is perfect for me as if I want to change something or a design is not to my liking, I can just iron it!

Here’s three I stitched earlier…

My plan is to use these in crazy quilting pages or simple textile pages so I’m trying to link them to my garden. Last week I stitched a garden gate. We have a gate in between the patio and the rest of the garden, mainly to keep the dogs off the main garden. It opened against a billowing large geranium with deep magenta flowers…

I painted the gate after I had stitched the outline and the sides, probably not the best order but I used aloe vera gel to stop the paint from bleeding and I seem to have got away with it. I painted the background with some green watercolour which was useful practise for my main garden embroidery – more of that on Sunday.

In the front garden we have an abies Korean, a tall rather spindly fir tree which has the most amazing purple fir ones, so this is what the fir tree design has become with a few (rather too many maybe!) purple French knots. I’ve just realised when photographing it that I still need to stitch a bit of earth and grass for it to stand on.

I also received in the post a lovely bundle of linens from Sookie Soo, it’s a mystery bundle of vintage linens of varying weights and sizes, the smallest is A5 size, up to A4, fifteen different pieces. They’ll be great for little embroideries as they have a lovely texture to them. They’re all white but they will take dye or paint. I think they will be perfect for my garden book.

I’ve still a long way to go with my garden book but I think I might start putting some of these little embroideries onto a page, otherwise it could be quite daunting at the end!

Posted in embroidery, Garden, Stitching my Garden, Textile Books | Tagged , , | 4 Comments