A few chores less to do this week



My Bag Calendar

This has been a productive week with a number of jobs finalised, but there are always a few left. Meanwhile, everyday I get to look at the next page on my bag calendar which is a present from DH. He certainly chose well this year as the idea is you put the day before behind the stash of cards and voila a new bag appears. They are all ages and vintage seems to crop up a lot like this one, 1910 crotcheted metal thread overlay with a braided handle, European and look at those little bobbles... oh so cute! I would love to own a bag like this and the shape is pretty too. At weekends you only get one card so I await tomorrow...

Anyway, one of the jobs I finished today was attaching some fringe to my new kitchen curtains for my door. I decided they lacked a certain edge if you know what I mean. I thought about buying some fringe and then even found some bullion fringe I liked on the internet but somehow I could not bring myself to hit the buy button.....Was it a return to my austerity days which was nagging me to 'make do and mend'?  Well I don't know but I found myself rummaging, as you do......Well I have quite a few places I can go when I have this urge and I soon found what I needed for inspiration, some odd bits of Linton Tweed fabric of course and a few bits of velvet too along with some lovely stiff chocolate brown ribbon, enough for two curtain bottoms. Last night you would have thought a bomb had hit my room with pieces of thread everywhere piled into little colour coordinated batches.

TIP. If you want some lovely different thread for couching down in machine embroidery you cannot go far wrong with a trip to Carlisle and bagging some Linton Tweed, (they now do mail order) Carefully tease and strip out individual threads and you have a unique range of threads which are perfect in embroidery. Did you know that Chanel have a lady who does the same and makes the braid for their Haute Couture suits from Linton Tweed fabric? In France this is called Passementerie, and here is an inspirational site run by Gina B.

Now back to my fringe, 1st I had to sew small pieces of thread to the ribbon keeping the ribbon in the middle and the thread evenly spaced either side. I kept the threads fairly tight together so you could not see the ribbon through the fringe but did not worry too much about a ragged edge as the colour changes and thread changes were more important to me. I was trying to achieve a rainbow effect. This was not looking too good last night I thought, so I left it until this morning wondering if it was turning into a mistake............But after a night's sleep and on reflection, I decided it was working and finished the 2nd phase of making the fringe which was to fold it over in on itself and sew down the long edge of the ribbon being careful to keep the threads well out of the way and sort of combing them into place with my stitch ripper as I sewed. The photo below shows this in progress.



Making the fringe

The 3rd part was to sew the fringe onto the curtains, which I did this afternoon but no photo as yet. However, they have met with DH approval who was consulted now and then I have to admit. Remember he went to Art College so has a natural eye for blunders..........and equally knows when something 'works'. So I can recommend giving it a go and I now fancy a few more fringes after checking out British Vogue online and seeing that they are going to be part of this years fashion trend which is craft......hmm


I must not get carried away with this success as there are still many more jobs awaiting this week.....one of which is the planting of chillies in January in the greenhouse otherwise they will be ripening in October like last year.



Don't you just love those gardening jobs.

 

Tip - Stamp more fabric for a 'scrappy' quilt

The scrappy quilt which really is made from all sorts of bits and pieces lying about has begun to look better than I could have imagined. This goes to show that sometimes you need to experiment and not be too particular. Anyway, it is also expanding to more than a throw... so its going to be a double bed quilt, I hope. But in order to fulfill that role it needs to be a touch bigger, not easy when your using scraps and you seem to have exhausted the supply. But wait a minute; some of those scraps were stamped with purple, green and yellow silk paint. So I found some more plain cream fabric and stamped some more! The result is above. I know it looks nothing at the moment, but trust me, once it is cut up and mixed up with other patterns it brings a new life to the design.  I now have enough free fabric to continue and who knows what the final result will be, not me that is for sure.

I am really enjoying this freestyle way of working and it harps back to the original idea for making quilts which was to be thrifty and use up precious and pretty fabrics of all types left over from previous projects to make a warm useful bed cover. Sometimes I think we lose track of that concept and go over the top buying too many fabrics for our stash and then don't know what to do with them except admire them in the closet. But, of course; once this quilt is made I won't have any scraps left so will be forced to buy more!!!! How convenient.

Make your own starch

I have been quilting for a number of years but had never realised that it is a good idea to starch the back of a quilt so it moves more freely through the machine when free motion quilting. The tip is not mine, all credit is due to Diane Gaudynski. I came across her work in a round about way but realised that she had one of her quilts in Harriet Hargrave's book 'Heirloom Machine Quilting' which first started me off on the road to machine quilting. Anyway, Diane gives a recipe for starch which I have tried and tested and it really is good.

I have interpreted it for English use.

DIANE'S STARCH

Dissolve half a teaspoon of cornflour in 2 tablespoons of cold water in a (1 pint) Pyrex jug. Add boiling water to make up a quarter of a pint and stir constantly, then add cold water to make half a pint. Let it cool and use it in an old pump spray bottle. Give it a good shake every now and then.

She says don't starch fabric for storage or 'it will attract little critters', so obviously it is ok to use if the quilt is going to be washed fairly soon. I have not tried it on my machine embroidery because it does not get washed and I don't want to attract little critters, but it has been used on my quilts lately and is ok.

I use it when I am pressing all of the squares or blocks and it works fine, plus you can use it to build up stiffness by spraying a few times. I regularly wash my quilts because most of them are in use on beds as I don't use duvets, which I dislike. I have friends coming to stay in a couple of weeks (they have a contemporary, warm, flat in Glasgow, with thick duvets) so I just need to make a quicky quilt because the two in the spare room are fine in Spring/summer but at this time of year a third might? be needed on the bed. I layer them according to the seasons and they all are rotated so they can be washed often, which is much nicer than a duvet when only the cover is cleaned frequently. I use cotton sheets under the quilts so they are the top layer, and I find I don't need blankets.

Here are some piccies of the Amy Butler fabric which is going to be quilted using a wool batting so its warm for the spare room. I am also using some fabric I picked up in a 'thrift store' in Palm Springs, California, when I was out visiting my daughter and her family in October. (You would be amazed at the shops in California, but that is another story.)

Machine embroidery tip

Sometimes you need to stand back from something and view it another way. Two ways of doing this are to 1. leave it a few days and go back with fresh 'eyes' and 2. to take a photo and then have a look at it instead. So given that a piece of machine embroidery I am working on needs accurate colours for water and sky, I decided to take a photo and placed some thread on it so that I could check the colours for suitability. (The piece is for the wall hanging and it is Catbells seen from Derwentwater.) This is the right side of the lake and I need to bring it to life with a bit of a shine so I am using Madeira embroidery thread. The left side has gone towards blue and I want to introduce a bit more green. It is never easy depicting water and the whole idea is that the lake should have movement, like ripples. So I have now 'auditioned' this thread as the Americans say! I know it seems to be a lot of trouble but you can't really unpick machine embroidery and sometimes you just have to go for it.....


The second problem is the sky, which at the moment is just painted on with silk paint, incidentally the fabric is a rough, tough calico. So this second photo should help me decide on the colours for the sky.

I need to bring a bit more tone into the composition too, but that can wait until I add some shading which is missing. So its more work on the Bernina this afternoon.

Meanwhile, I thought you might like to see a couple of photos from the felt making at Threlkeld last week. So here is a shot of some Nuno felt shown to us as an example of what could be achieved.

The photo below shows Marilyn explaining how to start treating the edges of the first felting so that they are straight.


It was a very good workshop but I could not stay to see what happened in the afternoon session, however, I did bump into Joan who said it had been very worthwhile. You can of course do so much with felt, and just to prove it, here is another picture of Marilyn's dog Holly, but this time the felted version. Isn't it cute!

Tips for printing your own fabric

I have been working most of the day on a special project which is going reasonably well. (A necessity as hubby and friend are putting up a covered way outside and the sound of drilling has forced me to bolt into my sanctuary.) I don't often work on small quilts, unless they are for Linus, but I find that when it comes to adding embroidery to a quilt I prefer to work on a much smaller scale. So this is going to be fun because it combines my love of machine embroidery and quilting, but I have also added some hand embroidery on this one too.
The last small quilt I made and embroidered I entered into a national competition and it did not win a prize but did have a photo shown in Patchwork & Quilting Magazine; so it was a runner up. This is the quilt, it's called 'Fuji Autumn'.


When I made this quilt I decided that all of the fabric would also be made by me, so I printed every single bit of it on my ink jet printer. I was quite pleased with the results as the colours did not fade too much from the original but of course they are never quite as bright as on the computer screen. Here is a close up of the leaves and flowers which were all made the same way and then heavily starched before cutting out and applying to the background. Then I used Robison Anton 'Twisted Tweed' thread to embroider on top of them.



The next photo shows a close up of mount Fuji and again I used embroidery to enhance the effect of the snow and rocks, but this time I used some Madeira thread too.

• Remember to exaggerate the colours because they are going to fade.
• Use simple clear designs which are not too fussy.
• Watch the proportion of elements in the design you may need to use your software to scale up or down.
• Ordinary 'compatible' inkjet ink works ok.
  
• Cotton fabric with a close count like 'percale' works well.
  

Of course I made the fabric myself, but you can buy commercially produced sheets which you use in your printer, but be aware they are extremely expensive. It is much cheaper to make your own!


Hand Embroidery Enthusiasts and Beginners this is for you!

I just have to share this new discovery with all of you, would you believe that Mary Corbet has a series of videos showing all of these stitches:-

Line Stitches & Bands

* Running Stitch
* Whipped Running Stitch
* Backstitch
* Whipped Backstitch
* Stem Stitch
* Portuguese Knotted Stem Stitch
* Coral Stitch
* Outline Stitch
* Couching
* Split Stitch
* Herringbone Stitch
* Double Herringbone Stitch
* Cretan Stitch
* Chevron Stitch
* Fern Stitch
* Palestrina Stitch
* Ladder Stitch
* Mountmellick Stitch
* Knotted Diamond Stitch


Chain, Fly, and Buttonhole Stitches

* Chain Stitch
* Heavy Chain Stitch
* Double Chain Stitch
* Raised Chain Stitch Band
* Alternating or Checkered Chain Stitch
* Cable Chain Stitch
* Rope Stitch
* Rosette Chain Stitch
* Wheat Stitch
* Vandyke Stitch
* Fly Stitch - Horizontal
* Fly Stitch - Vertical
* Feather Stitch
* Double Feather Stitch
* Blanket Stitch / Buttonhole Stitch
* Buttonhole Wheels


Detached Stitches & Knots

* Lazy Daisy
* Seed Stitch
* Spider Web - Ribbed
* Bullion Knots
* French Knot
* Colonial Knot
* Oyster Stitch
* Drizzle Stitch
* Woven Picot


Filling Stitches

* Fishbone Stitch
* Cretan Stitch
* Detached Buttonhole Filling
* Satin Stitch
* Lattice Work
* Bokhara Couching
* Roumanian Couching
* Trellis Stitch


Miscellaneous Embroidery Techniques

* Bullion Rose Bud Tutorial
A little over 13 minutes, this tutorial demonstrates how to make rose buds using the bullion knot. It also covers beginning and ending your threads when working small embroidery motifs.

They are all to be found on her website so if you want to sit back and learn a new stitch then just go here
You will see the videos at the top right hand side of her website under
'Video Library of Stitches' so just click on this and then scroll down to the list of stitches which is in exactly the order I have posted it above. Enjoy.