Curlews in the Red

Posted on February 22, 2022 by craftycreeky

At Skipton Stitchers we have a variation of travelling books going round at the moment, rather than each persons book going round the group we are given a theme each month, all based around our next exhibition which is in October. The title of our exhibition is There is no Planet B’, so we stitch a little piece on the theme, pop it in an envelope and then swop it for someone else’s embroidery which we can then stick in our book. Hope that makes sense!

Anyway, the theme for this month’s swop was species at risk. I decided rather than going for the obvious ones like tigers or elephants, I would look much closer to home. Many of our native birds are now on the ‘red list’, many are birds which when I was growing up were ten a penny, like the house sparrow, or the lapwing, I used to listen to skylarks as I walked home from school, trying to spot them high in the sky, now we rarely see them.

Another bird at risk is the curlew, it has a very distinctive shape and a long curved bill, so I decided it would be a good one to choose to embroider. I found a few images on the computer and sketched a basic shape. It’s only little as the final piece is only just over 4″. I traced it onto bondaweb, chose some brown batik and pressed the cutout shape onto the background fabric. I chose the same smudgy fabric for the background that I used for my magnolia – it’s a surprisingly useful fabric!

I back-stitched round, close to the raw edge, adding legs and the long beak with stem stitch. I started to embroider the wing area with button hole stitch, adding some fairly mat gold sequins and then herringbone above. I used one of the DMC variations which I find surprisingly useful,it’s 4522 which as well as brown, has violet and dark grey, it just seems to add a bit of colour without being too way out.

I then carried on stitching up the wing area with chain stitch, embellishing with a few beads, adding fly stitches and then seed stitches on the breast of the bird and a few pistil stitch on the tail. I was happy with my curlew but he needed something to ground him…

I rummaged in my textile box and found somesuitable organza, I tore a narrow strip off and laid it across so my curlew would be walking on it. I secured it with a couple of rows of running stitch and then used another variegated DMC thread to add fly stitch and straight stitch along the top edge. I think the torn edge works really well as grass. I added a few French knots and I was happy with it.

I trimmed it to size, bondawebbed it to some felt and blanket-stitched round the edge.

I was quite sad to see him go, I’m tempted to make another as I’m really pleased with how he came out. I enjoyed doing these mini challenges, it does push your creativity and encourages you to find your own style. As the piece has to fit in an A5 book it means it doesn’t have to take too long, I don’t like to spend much more than an evening on these.

Next month’s challenge is renewable energy or fossil fuels, so goodness know what I am going to do there!

Posted in embroidery, Skipton Stitchers, Stitch-a-long, Textile Books | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Stitching my Garden

Posted on February 21, 2022 by craftycreeky

Recently I started an on-line embroidery course with Nicki Franklyn from The Stitchery, she does beautiful, delicate stitching, very pretty. The course is called Stitch a Garden, it can be any garden, she is stitching Beatrix Potters garden up at Hilltop as an example, making a picture of the layout of the garden, she’s covering lots of techniques and ideas, such as stitching trees, pots, paving, colouring your fabric, choosing stitches etc. I’m really enjoying it though I haven’t started a map of my garden yet.

I’ve been mulling ideas round, I decided to make a textile book of the garden, mainly because I have an awful lot of pictures! I’m hoping to do little scenes of features in the garden as well as ‘maps’ of the three different areas in our back garden.

Stitching the ‘trees and shrubs’ sampler has given me a good page size and now I’ve sussed out that I can plot the maps more easily if I just draw them in portrait shape rather than the landscape plan which I see when I look out of the window (don’t know why it took so long for the penny to drop!!) I’ll hopefully start to make some progress.

In the meantime I decided to stitch one of my favourite trees in the garden, a magnolia stellata. In the spring it is covered with delicate white blooms, it’s only small, probably about 5′ tall and 6′ wide, though it’s probably over 25 years old as I think it was one of the first things I planted in the garden.

As you can see the tree blooms before any leaves appear. The flowers look a lot more delicate than their bigger cousins, magnolia soulangia. They’re like pure white little stars.

For the background I chose quilting cotton I bought from a destash. It’s a funny sort of fabric, like a duck egg blue background with smudges of brown and green…I know, I’m not really selling it and that’s what I thought at first, thinking of it in quilt making terms. However, for little embroideries it’s perfect, just a little colour variation in very neutral colours.

First I drew the tree, looking at it through the conservatory window. I traced it using a light box onto the fabric and started to stitch the trunk and branches with stem stitch. My original plan was to use three different shades of grey/brown but in the end I just used two, I thought I might use the lightest shade for adding extra thin branches later but I decided it wasn’t needed in the end.

I then started adding blossom, I used the DMC thread B5200 which is like the brilliant white paint version in thread! I very rarely use it as it is SO white, but that was just what I needed for the magnolia. I did think of varying it with some using the usual white DMC but in the end I just kept going with the brilliant white. I stitched two or three fly stitches on top of each other and then a straight stitch in the middle. I chose fly stitch as I thought it might be not quite so ‘straight’ as a straight stitch, giving the slightest of bends to the petals.

I added a few seed stitches at the base of the tree to ‘ground’ it, and at that stage I was pretty pleased with it, trying to decide if it was finished or not.

I put a photo on our Skipton Stitchers whatsapp group, asking if I should add a few french knots, or leave it. Someone suggested adding a pale pink straight stitch to the flowers. At first I hesitated, as the stellate flowers are pure white, however I decided to try. I wondered about adding a silver grey/green calyx too but when I tried it was totally lost on the background. I carried on with the palest pink just in the centre and I think it does just lift it, though it doesn’t show up well in the artificial light photo below.

Today at Skipton Stitchers we’re having a mini workshop on Inktense pencils, I think it might prove useful for stitching my garden.

Posted in embroidery, Garden, Skipton Stitchers, Textile Books | Tagged , , , | 12 Comments

Peppermint Purple SAL

Posted on February 20, 2022 by craftycreeky

Ever felt you have too many projects on the go? Well that’s me at the moment, it’s a good job I have these three weekly reporting in posts to keep me on track!

Three weeks ago I was working my way round the blackwork sampler with the filling in stitch. This is one of those stitches that look complicated at first, working out the pattern, then you get the hang of it and sail round…then you realise that you still have to concentrate as it’s easy to go wrong!

So there’s been a few unpickings and one mistake which is just going to stay there as hopefully it’s not too obvious.

You can just see on the above photo that I had also started outlining the reflection of Catbells. I was using the floss that I used for the two side bits but I wasn’t sure it was dark enough particularly on some of the busy squares. I decided to wait until I’d stitched a bit more of the filler stitch.

In the end I went one shade darker from the left side, I’ve actually one stitched as far as the top of Catbells, I’m tempted to leave it at that as reflections aren’t always clear all the way along and I think it might be just enough.

So I can now do a mini happy dance as the central blackwork is finished…

Now I just need to design a border. There are some different ones available on the Peppermint Purple website but I have an idea in my head which I’m going to try and plot on some graph paper.

If you fancy having a go at some blackwork then the Peppermint Purple sampler is a great way to try it, the 2022 one started at the beginning of the year, a square (or rectangle) is released each week. It’s free and there’s a very friendly facebook page too, it’s interesting seeing how different colourways look so different. There’s lots of designs on the website too if you don’t fancy committing to a year long project.

Stitch-a-long

This stitch-a-long is organised by Avis from Sewing beside the Sea, we each work on our project of choice, sharing our progress every three weeks, just enough to keep the motivation going, please follow the links to see what everyone else is stitching.

Avis, Claire, Gun, Constanze, Christina, Kathy, Margaret, Cindy, Heidi, Jackie, Sunny, Megan, Deborah, Renee, Carmela, Sharon, Daisy, AJ, Cathie, Linda, Helen

Posted in embroidery, Stitch-a-long | Tagged , , , | 10 Comments

Sewing Room Cross-stitch

Posted on February 16, 2022 by craftycreeky

I’ve been working on a cross-stitch for my sewing room for a while now, it’s been my handbag project, though really it’s a bit big for my sewing wallet and there’s too many different threads so they keep falling out, hence I’m trying to do a bit more at home so I can get it finished.

It’s a design from Stoney Creek, in some ways it’s a little bit dated in that the back-stitch (which I’ve still to start!) goes round the squares of cross-stitch, rather than cutting across to get a smoother outline, but it appealed to me as it includes a vintage sewing machine, quilting and sewing…perfect for me!

It’s a while since I shared my progress so I thought a little update was due (I’ve just looked, it was before Christmas!!) Last time I was still working on the sewing machine,,,

I’ve still not quite finished the sewing machine, but all I have to do now is the areas of metallic thread, not my favourite thread to sew with.

I’ve changed the colour scheme of the design to fit in with my sewing room decor, so rather than lots of pink, I’ve changed it to purple. This is working well apart from the tomato pincushion! A tomato shaped pincushion is very traditional, according to Wikipedia it goes back to Victorian times. The dusky pink threads didn’t look too far out for a tomato…shades of purple I’m not so sure about – maybe mine is a plum tomato 🙂

Either side of the sewing machine are four different quilt blocks, two are finished apart from the back-stitching and the other two are nearly there. Then I’ll be about a third of the way through the sampler, though this is probably the fiddliest bit.

I need to choose a suitable quote fairly soon as I’m not keen on the one in the pattern, I’ve two rows of writing, full width, to fill and I could make it three for the right quote…any suggestions welcome!

Posted in cross-stitch, embroidery, sewing room | Tagged , | 9 Comments

Secret Garden Quilt

Posted on February 15, 2022 by craftycreeky

I’ve just finished the first of nine blocks for my Secret Garden quilt. This was a BOM from Andrea of Raggedy Ruffy Designs last year (or may even be the year before!) Things happened and I never got started, but having put my name down for the next block of the month (which is looking gorgeous!) I thought I’d better get my finger out and start this one!

This was the initial layout I shared with you a few days ago…

Everything was laid out ready to stitch down.

The first task with these designs is just to get everything stitched down and secure. Andrea is very adept at just holding everything in place before she stitches it down, I’m not that brave so I put a dab of fabric glue on everything. Everything is outlined with a mid brown thread, Andrea goes round everything twice just to make sure all the pieces are well stitched down. I vary whether I do one or two, there is an element to which if one line is wobbly, the eye automatically sees the correct line, which is very useful if there as wobbly as some of mine!

At this stage it’s very easy to get disheartened as close up the stitching does look messy, I found it helpful to put it on my design wall every so often so I could stand back and see it. For those of you unfamiliar with this type of stitching, this is free motion machine embroidery. Usually when you stitch on a sewing machine there are ‘feed dogs’ under the machine foot which drive the fabric through at the correct speed, regulating the stitch length and keeping the stitch line smooth. With free motion embroidery the feed dogs are lowered, so the fabric can be moved in any direction and the length of the stitches is determined by how fast you move the fabric. It’s like drawing with a sewing machine…easier said than done!

The pink roses were the first area to be tackled with more detailed stitching. I’ve got quite a collection of variegated machine threads now, I bought a set from Oliver Twist’s when they had a half price offer on, there’s always some shades I haven’t got so sometimes I just used ordinary Gutermann thread.

Stems have been added with green thread, calyx have been feathered a bit and veins and serrated edges added to the rose leaves. Variegated thread sometimes looks completely different when it is stitched, the green I started with on the leaves at the top seemed to have alot of brown in it, so I swapped to one that looked initially too bright but it looked much better once stitched.

This panel is on the lower left hand side of the doorway to a secret garden, so there is quite a lot of stitching for perennial flowers, I’m not sure mine would pass an ID tests with the RHS but they are meant to be delphiniums (other end of stem is on next block up!) agapanthus (mine are more like alliums) achillea, scabiuos and salvia.

The birds were one of the last things to be stitched, which does have the advantage of gaining a bit of confidence before doing an obvious area. The eyes were the trickiest, they are edged with brown, filled in with black with a white dot…and you can imagine the size of it! Next time I’ll make sure I have a darker neutral thread underneath as the light grey I was using did show on darker colours. In the end I used a black finepoint pen to colour the eye in!

So here’s mine finished panel, it’s about 8″ by 13″, the photo has cropped in a bit tight but the brown area to the right is part of the wooden door to the garden.

It’s going to be a very busy, colourful quilt!

If you like Andrea’s designs but don’t fancy doing the applique she has now started getting panels printed of her initial watercolour design, usually they’re cushion size. They are gorgeous! These could either be used individually or stitched together for a quilt, if you are interested please follow the link to Raggedy Ruff Designs.

The next block has a lovely

Posted in Machine embroidery, Quilt-a-long, Raggedy Ruff Designs | Tagged , , | 10 Comments

The Seaside Quilt HQAL

Posted on February 6, 2022 by craftycreeky

Over the last week I’ve managed to find a nice routine with my hand-quilting, I’m using a large lap hoop and I can nicely sit with it whilst watching TV on an evening with my OH. Three weeks ago I’d just started hand-quilting my seaside quilt having planned to do a ‘sea’ shape but settled on a clamshell shape when I realised my ‘waves’ were creating the clam shell and both were apt really for a seaside quilt. This was my ‘progress’ last time, as you can see I had just started outlining the central lighthouse block…

I’ve had a slight change of plan since then, I’ve stitched half way round both borders of the lighthouse block using a dark blue and a stone coloured sulky thread but somehow it just didn’t work for me. I started on the clamshells which can be easily stitched with rows of ‘waves’, all in one direction which I find much easier to quilt. I’m quilting straight across blocks like the friendship star or the pinwheels, just leaving the central embroidered or fussycut squares to quilt round just inside the seam.

It’s such a busy, cheerful quilt that it’s not easy to see the quilting, but I’ve continued the clamshells across the double borders and then just quilted just in from the applique blocks such as the cottages, starfish and dolphin.

I’m not finding this quilt as easy to actually stitch as the cottage garden one and I’m blaming the wadding. This one has Hobbs 82/20 which is what I usually use for my quilts. For the cottage garden quilt I thought I had ordered the same on line but when it arrived it felt lighter so I wasn’t sure what it would be like. It turned out to be a dream for hand quilting, malleable and easy to stitch with a nice loft to give a cosy, cuddly finish. It’s a shame I don’t know what it’s called!! I’ve still got some scraps so I might send some to a couple of suppliers to find out what it’s called so I can use it next time I hand quilt.

As it hasn’t been as easy to actually stitch I’ve done a fair amount of stab-stitching to try and get the stitches anywhere near small enough (and I’m more of a big stitch quilter!!) so I was quite pleased that it still looks reasonable on the back…

…the wave effect seems to show more on the back!

I’m just using one colour a variegated Sulky thread now, it’s mid blues and greens and so far it’s blended in nicely with everything. I’ll pull out those first couple of threads round the lighthouse and carry on with the clamshells.

If you fancy making this cheerful quilt, it’s from the book by Kathryn Whittingham of Patchwork Katy called the Seaside Quilt. It’s written for beginners and hand-stitching so the instructions are really nice and clear. I’ve machine pieced and hand embroidered it but you could even do free machine embroidery if you prefer.

Hopefully next time I share this quilt I’ll have done more of a definite area, now I know what I’m doing !

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 Theresa

I’ll also be linking up with Kathy’s Quilts for Slow Stitching Sunday, so please follow the links for lots of hand-stitched inspiration.

Posted in Quilt-a-long, Quilting, Stitch-a-long | Tagged , , | 9 Comments

Secret Garden

Posted on February 5, 2022 by craftycreeky

Last month I fell for another quilt design by Andrea Walpole of Raggedy Ruff Designs, I made her Spring Wreath quilt a couple of years back and I still love it. A few weeks ago she showed on facebook the first central block of the winter wreath and I was hooked immediately, it’s a beautiful barn owl in flight. I’ve signed up for the monthly kit which will start in a few weeks.

This is my Spring Wreath quilt to give you an idea of what it will be like…

In the meantime I thought I really ought to start another Raggedy Ruff quilt kit I had in my stash, the Secret Garden. This is a very colourful and busy quilt with lots of flowers and birds. I’m going to try to make this quilt top before I start the next one, or at least get ahead with this one and then alternate between the two! I don’t want to end up with two quilt kits in my stash!!

With this in mind, yesterday I pulled out Block 1 of the Secret Garden quilt from my to-do box…

One thing I particularly love with Andrea’s quilts is the backgrounds, they’re always such a wonderful mix of blocks, colours and textures with linen’s mixed with batiks and little pops of colour.

The first task was to make the background. I find these fairly straight forward as Andrea’s instructions are pretty clear with written instructions and diagrams. I do have to concentrate though, the seam ripper usually comes out at some point, as it did with this block – it’s so easy to put something the wrong way round.

With the background complete I could then turn my attention to the applique design. The individual shapes are traced onto freezer paper, which can then by ironed on to the batik fabric, this makes it much easier to cut out the fiddly shapes but afterwards it just peels off the fabric without leaving any residue.

The only bit I changed was the tail of the wren, to me a wren’s tail has to be pointing upwards. As it’s such a busy design I numbered the shapes so I could work out which was which once they were cut out, I did get a bit muddled trying to work out which rose was pink and which was peach, in the end I decided it didn’t really matter and just went with what I thought looked right from the photos.

With everything cut out I then laid them in position on the fabric. The instructions include photos of all the important stages, I often find these easier to follow than the diagram as you can see how the applique lies on the quilt background.

Andrea just holds the pieces in place while she stitches round each bit, I’m not that brave so I put a tiny blob of fabric glue on each piece so at least if I sneeze the whole lot won’t fly away!

Hopefully tomorrow I will start the free-motion embroidery which brings these designs to life. If you fancy having a go at one of these quilt then have a look on the Raggedy Ruff website, there’s lots of designs and kits.

Posted in Quilt-a-long, Quilting, Raggedy Ruff Designs | Tagged , , , , | 8 Comments

Stitch-a-Garden

Posted on February 1, 2022 by craftycreeky

Just before Christmas I fell for a series of on line classes by Nicki Franklin of The Stitchery. I’d admired her work for quite a while on instagram, she does beautiful, pretty embroideries of flowers, country scenes, cottages…this was an on line course to stitch a garden, you can stitch any garden, she’s doing the garden at Hilltop where Beatrix Potter used to live as an example. I’m going to stitch our garden.

The first few classes dealt with places to get inspiration, how to sketch your design out, transferring it from paper to fabric, painting fabric with watercolours, mixing colours. Here’s my watercolour sample, this will be used for applique…

I haven’t as yet finalised my sketch, the last couple of weeks I’ve been mulling ideas over. I want to make my embroidery into a textile book, I have enough pictures round the house and it would be rather nice to have a stitched record of the garden at the moment. We have a choice of either doing a flat plan of the garden, or doing a raised viewpoint. After much thought I’ve decided to stitch a flat plan and then stitch features and scenes within the garden as separate little embroideries which can then go in the book, possibly embellished with some crazy patchwork!

Our back garden is divided into three quite separate areas, the patio at the bottom, the Amber & Amethyst garden (AKA the beer garden!!) and the lawn with the summerhouse and pond at the top. I’m planning to do an embroidery of each area as a flat plan and then do little embroideries of say the summerhouse, the arches, seats, pond, birdbath.

During the last class she showed us different ways of stitching trees and shrubs, some are for adding texture to an appliqued area such as seed stitch or French knots. She had stitched a little sampler which looked a lovely way of displaying them.

I found a nice piece of old linen in my stash (I’ve been collecting little bits for a while) it was pretty fine so I backed it with some calico to give a bit of stability, it also makes it easier to finish threads off at the back. I stitched the grid with a simple running stitch making 1 3/4″ squares.

I really enjoyed trying different stitches and different threads too. I’ve recently been trying to sort out my embroidery threads, the non DMC ones, I’m putting them all on bobbins and sorting them according to colour. There’s perle threads, linen threads, hand-dyed threads, I’m hoping that I’ll now use a wider variety of threads rather than just reaching for the conveniently placed DMC.

The first row id French knots, chain stitch in a heap and seed stitch, I tried four different threads with the seed stitch in particular and also tried the double seed stitch which Cathy Reavy had suggested, I think I prefer the single stitch! The next row are bullion knots and two leaves, one in satin stitch and one in fishbone stitch which is my favourite for leaves.

On the third row there is feather stitch, mini trees from French knots and straight stitch, then fly stitch trees. As the fly-stitch is basically upside down to make a tree, I had to turn the work upside down to stitch it! I was particularly please with the taller tree as I used different sizes of stitches to give the effect of the boughs of a fir tree.

The bottom row is bigger tree embroideries, the autumn one is little chain-stitches, I found that one more tricky to stitch but I do like the effect. The fir tree in the middle is just straight stitch and the cute blossom tree is French knots with a variegated green and pink DMC thread.

This nicely gives me a working size for my book pages of about 8″ by 6″.

I think I’m going enjoy this stitch-a-long.

Posted in embroidery, Garden, Stitch-a-long, Workshops | Tagged , , , | 8 Comments

Purple Ombre Cake

Posted on January 31, 2022 by craftycreeky

When my kids were growing up I always made their birthday cakes, we had a couple of cake decorating books and they would leaf through the pages and choose which one they wanted, I did My Little Pony, Football, the worst one was Super Mario as his head was a huge round cake which kept falling off his tiny body!!

Roll on quite a few years and I got a message a few weeks ago from James asking if I could make his partner’s daughter (my new to me granddaughter) a birthday cake, pretty please…he sent me a photo of what she was after, a tall purple ombre cake with drippy decoration. Of course I agreed…and quickly went on google and youtube for hints and tips. Youtube should be banned! They make it all look so easy!

Have you ever felt thwarted at every stage!!

Luckily I decided to make the cakes in advance, I could always freeze them for a few days. I made four cakes, they went in the oven a lovely shade of purple…and came out looked mucky teal! I made two into a cake with a bit of buttercream and took it into work. One of the doctors asked me what the celebration was, I told him it was a disaster cake, these were rejects! It actually tasted really nice and was all eaten by 8.45am. Every one knows at work that if you don’t take cake when it first appears, by the time you have a break it will have gone, so eating cake at 8.30 am is the norm! Inside the cake was a deep purple, but not a nice shade…

I posted the photo on the WI page, the WI is renown for it’s baking so I was sure someone could help. They did. Apparently I needed a white cake. I googled white cakes. Cakes here in the UK are traditionally made with equal weights of eggs, sugar, flour and butter, the butter and the eggs make it quite a yellowish, fluffy mixture, especially when your free range eggs have lovely orange yolks. In my limited experience, they do taste different to the American cakes. American recipes often seem to include oil instead of butter or buttermilk and the mixture is much more of a liquid, apologies to all over the pond for this generalisation! I found a Betty Crocket white cake mix, I’ve never used a cake mix before but I ordered four boxes for next day delivery!

James brought round some food colouring they’d used before called Progel by Rainbow Dust. They were right when they said you only need a small amount! My cakes came out in lovely shades of purple…

They’re a lot ‘holier’ than cakes I’ve made the usual way, I’m not sure if that was me or that’s how they are, but they were purple and that’s all that mattered! I trimmed the tops off to level them and then put them in the freezer overnight. This is a tip I gleaned from youtube as it makes them easier to stack.

On Saturday morning I made a huge batch of butter icing and started to stack them. This is about the only bit of the cake that went without a hitch!!

I coloured a corner of the icing bowl with purple and started to cover the sides, a bit of white, then a bit of purple, so it had a nice marbled effect. I had the bright idea of holding the cake firmly by putting the cake tin base on the top so I could give a bit of even pressure, it did seem to help a lot. At this stage I was pretty pleased with myself…

The next task was the drippy top, you know, where they have nice even drips which drip down the cake so perfectly. I watched youtube. The cake bakers at work had convinced me it would be a white chocolate ganache rather than icing so I made up a runnier ganache to the recipe given on youtube. It went on easily enough, but promptly ran off and puddled at the bottom. Even worse it just gave the cake a sort of yellowy hue.

After exchanging photos with James I decided to scrape as much of the white chocolate off as I could, add some more purple to make it a bit more marbled and then tried white royal icing instead. It still wasn’t perfect but it was a lot better. I left it for about an hour before I did the final touch of big purple iced twirls on the top. It looked great…for about half an hour, then half of the purple blobs decided to sliver over the edge!

At this point I had several large gins and decided I would fix it in the morning!

First thing Sunday morning I scraped off the offending purple twirls, made another batch of icing as close to the same shade of purple as I could, and redecorated the top, adding a bit more to some of the earlier ones so they looked even. I piped a line of purple shells round the base to tidy it all up and sprinkled some gold stars on the top.

It looked OK, though obviously where the purple blobs had jumped off, the sides were a bit messy, but it was the best I could do. James picked it up and took it straight to the party.

We didn’t go to the party as it was being held in a busy public place, but apparently she loved it and said it was the best cake ever!

And it was beautifully purple inside.

Posted in Baking | Tagged , , | 14 Comments

Peppermint Purple SAL

Posted on January 30, 2022 by craftycreeky

I’ve made pretty good progress with my blackwork over the last couple of weeks, it’s surprising how much you can do when you focus on something!

Three weeks ago I was still stitching the blocks in the lake, trying to make the reflection of Catbells a little clearer,,,

I’ve finished the blackwork blocks and I started the inner border, this is the border which squares it off. I’d been pondering for a while how to stitch the border colourwise, do I continue the skyline across or just fill in with one colour? I decided to continue the line across, I had a dark green/brown Weeks thread in just the right shade, Weeks are overdyed threads so there is a lovely subtle variation. I used this thread at both sides of Catbells and decided to outline Catbells with it too. Using the same thread I think helped to bring it all together. I also then had the dilemma of whether to back-stitch inbetween the blocks…I decided not to, I can always add them later if I feel it need it.

The sky is stitched with another Weeks thread, called appropriately Sky!

I looked through my limited stash of Weeks threads and decided to stick to DMC for the reflection of Catbells. I used 926 which is a nice blue/green/grey colour. I’ve still to back-stitch most of the outline of the reflection, it doesn’t show up as much, especially on the right, but I’m fine with that, reflections are often intermittent.

The rest of the lake is being stitched with Blue Heron. Once that is complete I just have a final border to stitch, I’m not quite decided on my border design yet, but I’m thinking about stitching the names of the area with leaves in between, possibly in a dark grey.

Hopefully by next time I’ll be on to my final border. This design is a free SAL from Claire of Peppermint Purple, the blocks were released weekly on facebook ( and I presume on her website) last year. She has just started the 2022 version so if you fancy having a go at blackwork then follow the link to her website or search on facebook. It’s a great way of trying lots of patterns and deciding if blackwork is for you. The facebook page is very friendly and without the dramas of some groups!

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

Avis, Claire, Gun, Constanze, Christina, Kathy, Margaret, Cindy, Heidi, Jackie, Sunny, Megan, Deborah, Renee, Carmela, Sharon, Daisy, AJ, Cathie, Linda, Helen

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