Back to blogging

I've just realised that it's 7 months since my last entry here so I'm going to try to blog regularly from now on. Lots has happened during that time including a lot of stitching in various forms - mainly bridesmaids dresses for Jon's wedding in August.

Last week I went to the Knitting and Stitching Show at Alexandra Palace - I decided to go twice, once on my own and again with a friend. When I went on thursday I booked to do 2 workshops in the afternoon, the first one was Silk Shading and the second Goldwork, both with a tutor from the Royal School of Needlework. It's ages since I really did any embroidery but I really enjoyed doing the Silk Shading and have managed to complete the design since getting home. I didn't think I was doing the wings particularly well when I was in the class, however the tutor and those around me seemed to think that it was really good showing a good direction of the stitches - see what you think. (photo tomorrow as its too late to do it tonight). Most of my purchases at the show were linked to dyeing fabric including a book on tray dyeing and a book about Shibori.

I started the Goldwork design in class but haven't had a chance to finish it yet - it has inspired me to get a goldwork design of harebells that I bought at the show a couple of years ago and need to finish.

In the meantime I am in the process of quilting a quilt for Matthew who has just gone off to university a couple of weeks ago. It was supposed to be ready for him to take with him, however, when I got to the quilting stage I was rushing to get it finished and made a mess of it so I pulled it out and started the quilting again. This time I am much happier with it - I quilted much of it in the ditch, I then digitised an african drum outline to use as a quilting motif on some of the plain blocks and am now adding some more straight quilting lines diagonally across some of the blocks. I will try to finish it tomorrow and add the binding.

Snow and fabric dyeing

Well my new year 'resolution' to blog more didn't happen - we are now half way through February and this is only the second entry of the year - note to self - must try harder. This was the scene outside the house on Thursday last week - we had about 4" snow and more on Friday.

On Friday Gerard and Matt built a snowman in the back garden - he didn't last very long I'm sorry to say.


I spent part of Friday 'snow dyeing' - I had seen it mentioned on a couple of blogs, but it wasn't something which I had come across before. Basically you soak the fabric in a water, salt and soda solution, place it on a rack (which I didn't have so I used the utility room sink and a cat litter tray) then drizzle two or three colours of Procion dye solution over them.

Leave it until the snow has melted then wash it out and see the beautiful mottled results.



The two pieces of fabric that I dyed using golden yellow, fuschia and magenta turned out very well as you can see from the pictures, unfortunately the piece I dyed using golden yellow and medium blue only took the yellow and parts of it turned marginally green. I don't know why it didn't take the blue at all so have tried again today - that under the snow at the right of the picture below. I've also included some pieces of silk this time as well (mum's suggestion - thanks mum!). As the snow is now melting as it is raining I don't know that I'll get any more opportunities this winter to play with this techniques. I'll just have to enjoy using the pretty pieces of fabric that have been created.

Happy New Year - I have decided to try to blog more this year even though it is going to be a busy one - more about that in a later post.

Gerard's Quilt
I have spent the last couple of months, in amongst other things, making a quilt for the flat in Germany for Gerard to use - I need to make a second one for when I or visitors are visiting but haven't yet started it. Here is the front of the finished quilt - the stars were foundation pieced, then the flowers were machine appliqued before adding the sashing.

For the reverse I decided to make it a bit more 'manly' and used a lot of black, white, cream and red music fabrics left over from Jon's quilt - inevitably I didn't have enough and we had to go searching for more! So I'm still left with a pile of black and white music fabrics! This time I used a much simpler block that I pieced as time was running short, added sashing then quilted it.

The only thing I was disappointed with was the quilting as I found it very difficult to match up the sashing front and back, so I think for mine I will choose an easier backing and possibly do ita as a 'quilt as you go' in smaller sections.

New Bag - April BQL Challenge Bag
Yesterday I finished making this bag which is from the British Quilters List April pattern (slightly adapted). Having treated myself to a new sewing machine a couple of weeks ago I used various features that came with it to create the bag.

I only had a smallish piece of the printed pansy material so decided to team that up with the plain cream and use the new embroidery unit to embroider the pansies onto it. The machine that I have bought is a Bernina and has the Bernina Stitch Regulator that I can attach to it so I used that for doing all of the quilting - good practice to find out how best to use it. I used the walking foot to quilt the handles and one of the inbuilt embroidery patterns to put a stipple pattern along the cream border at the top. And of course used the machine to sew it all together. One of the feet that I got to go with the machine is the edge stitch foot and I used this to top stitch the cream band at the top to the pansy material. I'm quite pleased with the result - it's quite a large bag but far too pretty to use for grocery shopping which was the original idea of the BQL challenge.

So - I love my new sewing machine - now I am getting used to having lots of little (and big) extras that my other machine didn't have - like a thread cutter - sooo useful and cuts down on thread wastage, the needle down position and a knee lift for raising the presser foot to turn corners which you do a lot of with applique. My new machine and I are going to be very happy together I know!

February bag - here is the bag I made for the February bag challenge on British Quilters List. I haven't followed the instructions fully as I was supposed to do the swirls with a thread in the bobbin of machine and I have hand couched it down, also it was supposed to have hearts or leaves on it and I have left them off. I did, however, hand dye the fabric for both the outside and the lining material.


I haven't got a lot of other sewing done recently as a lot of my time has been tied up with organising things to do with my husbands job in Germany - mainly tring to make sure we have enough money in the right place at the right time to pay everything. So far the job seems to be going well and he is enjoying the flat we are renting there - this week he is back working in the UK.

Here are a couple of photos of the flat - it is the top floor of this building complete with a mezzanine - and yes - we do have to climb the stairs in the turret to get up to the flat!

this is one end of the lounge

I would add a couple more pictures but blogger isn't co-operating tonight.

Gosh - it's ages since I posted anything here so time for a quick update. I passed the Module 2 and have started on my Module 3 work. I've done virtually no stitching over the Christmas and New Year period, even though I had high hopes of getting lots done - having a bad cold over New Year didn't help my motivation. However, yesterday I did some weaving - one of the tasks for the Module 3 - here are my first 2 attempts. I may do a bit more as I really quite enjoy it.


This weekend I also made a bag for the BQL bag challenge following the pattern given for January.

Module 2 is finished and I posted it off to my tutor yesterday for marking. Now I can get on with Module 3 which I actually started when we went on holiday in July, only I've lost the bit of stitching that I did while we were away - will have to go and have a biiiiiig search for it. No more stitching to report.

The wallhanging is finished! I hand quilted the lines on it to resemble water flowing down and painted some more silk to use to bind it and got it finished - I am quite pleased with how it finally turned out. Now I need to finish the rest of my samples and paperwork then I can send it all off to be marked.

C+G Module 2 - I'm trying to get Module 2 finished - a couple of weeks ago I worked out how I was going to do the final wallhanging and did some silk painting that I could then quilt. The design is based on a postcard of pebbles - I am using just one of them as inspiration for the shape and colours. The shapes of the different sized pebbles and the border were outlined with gold gutta. I embellished the silk painting by using salt on the largest of the pebbles, printing on the smallest and markal paintstiks on the middle one and outer border.

Once It was dried and heat set I then quilted the pebbles and the plain green border - however I didn't like the quality of my painting or free machine quilting - so its back to the drawing board - I cut off the border and echo quilted round the shapes, thinking I would then applique them onto a background - still didn't like that.

So - I cout out each of the pebbles and appliqued them onto a newly painted piece of silk - I also stuffed them as I sewed them on. After layering the silk I hand quilted round each pebble.


Now I need to work out the rest of the quilting then the border. I am going to try and use the original speckled border for this piece - if there is enough fabric.

Quilts and sewing space

My niece has recently gone off to University for the first time having spent a gap year working and travelling. Part of her time was spent in Tanzania working in a Bible School and training to climb Kilimanjaro, which she succeeded in doing towards the end of her stay. Before she went I asked her to see if she could bring back some material for 'an African project I would be doing over the summer'. She obliged by bringing back some tartan fabrics, some black and white fabric and 2 different lots of batik style fabrics with animals on them. Over the last 3 years or so I had been collecting very brightly coloured patterned fabrics as I had it in mind to make her a quilt for going off to Uni - she loves very bright colours. But - how to mix the 2 lots of fabric into a quilt that didn't look a complete mess?

Looking for inspiration early in the summer I found a Fabrications magazine that had a quilt in it with stars and decided to adapt it to use the bright fabrics - many of the smaller sized stars have centres made from a duck material which added some humour to it. I also used the tartan fabric and some of the batik fabric for the centre stars/squares. The black and white fabric had a variety of African motifs on it so I cut them out and appliqued them onto blue fabric to use in the corners.

Here is the finished front - I started by trying to be very random in my choice of fabrics, but that didn't work for me and I thought I would just end up with a mess so I was then more organised in my combinations of fabric.


Next to the back - the batik fabric was pale aqua and brown with animals on it - I knew I wanted to use large panels of it and managed to find some chocolate brown patterned fabric at the Festival of Quilts which seemed to go very well - I also bought a bit that was brown with gold glitter on it!


I bound the edge with a plain darker aqua coloured fabric, outlined some of the motifs on the front with Madeira 'Glow in the dark' thread and quilted it with a variegated thread in primary colours and got it finished so my sister can deliver it to Christine today - hope she likes it and enjoys using it.

Now for my sewing space - here is a photo of the sspace where I was doing some silk painting last week in the kitchen.
When I counted up I realised that I was storing my stuff in at least 9 different places around the house - we live in a 3 storey house - so that's a lot of stairs to climb everytime I was trying to do a project. My very tolerant husband accepted the fact that there was always stuff lying around the lounge and kitchen but would have much preferred it to be tidier. So ... last Friday I mentioned the problem to him and we decided to move things around on the ground floor - the result being that I have my own dedicated sewing room!! Wonderful. Son number1 now has a music room for a bedroom when he comes home from Uni at Christmas (it has 2 pianos in there + guitars and amps) but there is room still for his bed, so he does have somewhere to sleep.

So - here is the room - the wardrobe has been pinched from Son Number1 and now houses my fabrics and things like freezer paper and heat gun




Now all I need is to finish marking lots of my students assignments then I will have time to play and create in there - wonderful!

Although I have been very quiet on the blogging front recently, I haven't been quiet on the creative front. During the first half of October I decided to make a bag and to stitch on to it the embroidery panel that I did as my piece for the Sumptuous Surfaces course I took during the summer. Here is the finished article -

It's finished! For the past 9 months a group of 6 of us from church have been working hard to create a banner to celebrate the church's 350th Anniversary and we finished it this week just in time for our new associate minister's induction this afternoon. The banner looks really good in situ on a white wall and is 6ft wide by 5ft high - unfortunately this photo isn't particularly good as I had to stand on a chair about 20ft away from it to take it, but it gives you the general idea.

We have depicted the church in the centre surrounded by groups of people representing the different eras over the years eg puritans, victorians and the multicultural influence today including young people and children.

Needlefelting/Embellishing - I have looked with interest at the increasing coverage on blogs and in the media about using embellisher machines and wondered about the benefits of having one. For a minimum of £200 it seems an expensive machine, which I'm still not sure that a) I would have the space for and b) how much I would use it. I am interested to see how other people use them and what they create with them.

With all this in mind I was very interested when I discovered that Clover have brought out a needlefelting tool - I know that needlefelting needles have been around for ages - they always looked rather dangerous to me, whereas this one has a safety guard round the needles, so may cut down the number of times that you spear yourself. I decided that at £12 this was a much more cost effective option to try similar effects to the machine. So, I purchased one today from Hobbycraft, along with a foam pad (much cheaper than the Clover mat) and some felting wool and had a go this afternoon. Here are my first 2 experiments - firstly a small landscape scene on a base of felt, using the wool and some threads from my stash

then an abstract on a base of lightweight calico, again using mainly wools and silk tops

The needles work very well with the wool fibres, fibrous yarns and silk tops but not so well with smoother threads as there is little for them to push through the surface, although calico did work well as a base. With the smoother yarns I needed to put a little bit of wool over them to hold them in place. I shall keep experimenting as it was great fun and they would make a great base for adding beads and hand or machine embroidery to.