Garden bird kits

 

My Garden Bird kits have flown away to new perches at The Store Haworth and The Stitch Society.  These beautiful kits have everything you need to stitch an appliqued wren, gold crest, blue tit or nuthatch.  The picture stays mounted in the embroidery hoop ready to hang on your wall or give away as a present. 

Exercise Books

 

Remember school exercise books?  They always held such promise, a new beginning if you like.  During these days of lockdown, I have been busy making my own book, gathering groups of stitches together and making samples of work to show their use and usefulness.  I have shared them with my sewing groups, making up little kits containing selections of my favourite threads, fabrics and haberdashery.

Now it's complete and I have bound it with fabric covers, front and back, carefully joining each set of pages together using Coptic stitch binding.

Happy Christmas!

 

Appliqued cotton organdie snowflake with folk art style stitches

Wishing everyone a very happy Christmas and looking forward to a better new year!

Back to School

Hurrah - classes have re-started in a Covid-secure environment!  

To celebrate the return of regular workshops I have devised a stitch sampler book.  Here are the first pages to practise straight stitches and chains.  Each double page has examples of the different kinds of stitch with a small sampler on the opposite page.  There will be 8 double pages in all which build into a small fabric book.

Classes run on Tuesday at Glusburn Institute 10-12noon and Thursday at West Lane Baptist Church, Haworth 10-12:30.  Message me to reserve a place or order a kit.

Purple reign

 

When someone sends me a photograph as beautiful as this, I can't help but get out my sewing threads and recreate it in stitch.  The wonderful textures and colours captured in this image taken by Lindsay have been translated into two pictures worked in darning stitch (below left) and kantha (below right).  Both are available as kits.

Patterns

 

Pattern or pattern?  This is both.  It's been a nice diversion from making up my own patterns but I still like a challenge and this was exactly what I got when my daughter presented me with a PDF pattern for some palazzo pants.  28 pages and a lot of sellotape later, I had an outline but no instructions!  Using an old sheet to make a toile, I tested the pattern and the fit, only to learn that the waistline was too low and the pockets were unworkable.  

The fabric itself proved to be difficult to source.  During the lockdown period, sewing has proved to be very popular and at one point many retailers had sold out of fabric.  Luckily Sew Essential came up with this joyous leaf print.  So here they are, Summer-ready palazzo pants.

The evolution of an idea

This is my last entry for Embroiderer's Guild Travelling Books.  The theme is WINDOWS and I have to confess that it left me stumped for ideas.  I thought of all the wonderful stained glass that I've seen in cathedrals around Europe: of the mills that inhabit the Pennine towns where I live: of tiny mullioned windows in stone cottages and huge panoramic windows in converted barns.  But then I spied a humble telephone box - there are quite a few around here, nostalgic relics of the past, lingering in gardens or converted into mini libraries.  I thought about my teenage years and of all the times that I had snuck away to have a private conversation in the days when the only telephone in the house was situated in the hallway and in full ear-shot of the rest of the household.  Of the times when I had dutifully called home whilst away at University, all the time looking through the windows of a telephone box at an unfamiliar landscape. As I sketched out ideas of snatched conversations I was reminded of Roy Lichtenstein's exuberant pop art with comic strip call-outs and polka-dot backgrounds.  I found a linen fabric with a subtle print for the background (not spots but certainly textured) and then I reverse appliqued a telephone box, cutting back the red fabric to reveal the windows.  Mottled blue fabric for the ever-changing Yorkshire sky.  My speech bubbles will be made using raised embroidery techniques - work in progress but you get the idea.