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 -

Sumptuous Surfaces - my first piece is finished! It has taken me a couple of weeks to actually stitch it but now it is done and I am really pleased with it. I used Caron Waterlilies threads, DMC stranded cotton, fancy threads couched down, beads and shells to create the textured surface. Now I need to decide what I am going to do with it - am I going to make it into a picture or use it in some other way.


Festival of Quilts - I spent a lovely couple of days there at the end of last week - as it worked out, I could've done with more time to walk round the exhibition as I had booked a couple of workshops which obviously cut down my time. On Friday I did a full day workshop with Gloria Loughman from Australia, called Playing on the Surface - it was great fun and very inspirational. She showed a way of working and creating a unique quilt which totally suits my way of working - making it up as you go along! Now I have lots more work to do on the quilt to get it finished.

This week I am going to attempt to finish my Module 2 embroidery work which is actually different kinds of quilting - I have silk painted the fabric for the 3 samples, now I need to quilt them, then decide what to do for the final wallhanging. I am basing my work on a photograph of pebbles, that I found in France.

Sumptuous Surfaces progress - well I have made a start on stitching my piece - hampered a little by the fact that I have ready Harry Potter 6 in the last couple of days and am just about to start reading HP7. Originally I was going to work in creams/ecru colours, but found that I didn't have very much thread in that colour scheme - so after a trip to the embroidery shop on Thursday I ended up with this colour scheme - I had already outlined the shells before I went.


So, now I have finished the border and filled in the lines on the shells using pulled back stitch in one strand of cotton. I then used 2 strands to do a very random herringbone stitch in the top half of the picture to give a base for the more texture stitches. I don't think I will do that at the bottom - I want to leave it feeling lighter. I started to work some buttonhole wheels/cups using perle cotton and then couched a wonderful fuzzy yarn at the bottom right hand corner. Now I need to add lots more textured stitches when I can drag myself away from Harry Potter.

I have spent the last 10 days working on my 2 quilts for the Festival of Quilts - for the past few days all I seem to have done is stitch and very little else.

Well both quilts are finished and on their way - hurray! It was rather a close call in the end as I finished the roses quilt on Monday and blocked it out yesterday - it looked quite good when it was finished - I spent 2.5 days machine quilting it in the end. I started this quilt about 3 years ago on an online course through Quilt University it is machine appliqued onto a background of 2" squares.

I finished stitching the blue quilt as the UPS man rang the doorbell!!!! I had asked them to come between 3 and 5 to pick the quilts up but he arrived early at 2.45 so he had to wait while I took a photo of it, gave it a very quick press and packed it up - now I realise that I didn't have a proper look at the finished item so don't really know what it looked like overall - it'll be a nice surprise when I get to the Festival of Quilts.


The four corner blocks are candlewicking - french knots, the central block is beaded and the applique blocks are done by hand, the sashing scrolls are couched with Caron Watercolours thread.

I've attached photos of the finished items - the blue one hasn't come out very well, I'm afraid. I know that I could've sent them by UPS tomorrow but I wanted to make sure that they had enough time to get to the depot, in case UPS had any sort of delay. Now I can get on with the rest of my life. So...

Tomorrow is likely to be filled with shopping, washing, ironing, tidying up and starting to read HP6 as a refresher before I move on to HP7. I have started to outline my shells for my first Sumptuous Surfaces piece but need some more neutral cream/sandy coloured threads to make the background interesting.

Sumptuous Surfaces - well I ended up with some free time last night as i found that I didn't have enough fabric to do what I wanted to do with one of my wallhangings - will have to go shopping today, so I played around with some ideas for a design and this is what I have decided to do.

My concept is 'Happy family holidays' - there are 4 of us in the family - hence 4 shells on the beach. I decided to go with the shells as I thought that they would be easier to work with in a monotone colour scheme and lend themselves more to a variety of textural stitching.

I will work the design on cream coloured Belfast linen - the background will be heavily textured stitching, including beads and small shells that I bought on holiday in Bulgaria (a bracelet so they already have holes drilled in them). The shells themselves will be outlined, possibly in stem stitch, then I shall use pulled work stitches to fill them in, trying if possible to echo the vertical lines of the patterning on the shells.

I'll have to see if I can get started this week - depends on how the wallhangings go and how bored I get with hand quilting and finishing.

Current work - I am busy at the moment working on 2 wallhangings for the Festival of Quilts - I need to have them finished before the end of the month so that they can be posted off - as usual I am working on them at the last minute and still have a lot to do. One of them involves a lot of handstitching - I have done all of the candlewicking and hand applique, now I am on to hand quilting and then putting it all together. This is one of the applique blocks (I completed 3 of them this week).


The other wallhanging needs some machine applique on it then to be quilted and finished - fortunately I have a completely clear week ahead of me, with absolutely nothing in it but housework and sewing.

I haven't had time to do any work on my Sumptuous Surfaces design although I have been following all the discussions in the forums - I just don't have time for anymore handstitching at the moment. However I will try and finalise my design for it this week when I need a break from stitching.

Then of course there is my C+G work - I need to get on and finish Module 2 so I can send it off for assessment, before I do any more work on Module 3.

I'm also resisting picking up Harry Potter 7 - I've decided that I need to reread HP6 first, but don't want to get engrossed in it until the quilts are done. Matthew read HP7 in 8 hours yesterday - he did nothing else except eat and drink until he had finished it, now Gerard is reading it.

With all these things on my list of things to do, it's a good job that I don't have to go to work for the next 7 weeks - I love my job and the summer holidays!

Sumptuous Surfaces - getting started on lesson 1. Lesson 1 is all about finding a concept to use for the first sample and using the ideas from the concept to explore design ideas and to develop the design.

I started thinking about this at the weekend - as we have just returned from a very happy family holiday, I decided to think about the best holidays that we have had as a family. I did a mind map including ideas about places we have visited which have been our best family holidays (Bulgaria, Florida, Rome, Lanzarote), the weather (sunny, hot), accommodation (selfcatering, hotel), getting there (flying), location (seaside, city break), activities (sight seeing, beachcombing, theme parks, museums, stitching, reading, people watching) and more. We plan to do one more big family holiday probably next year to the US, then I expect our eldest son won't come on holiday with us again (he's 19 now and at Uni).

So I have decided that my concept is Happy family holidays.

Motifs that spring to mind linked to this are - shells, pebbles, sunshine, space shuttle, palm trees and stingrays (from when we were in Florida) and Roman architecture.

I have never before had to explore a whole concept like this and am looking forward to keeping a record of it in a sketchbook and seeing where the ideas take me.

So I started by collecting some pictures of some of the ideas - shells, stingray and palm trees. In one of forum postings a suggestion was made to look at sand patterns so I thought I'd have alook at those as well. I sketched some of the designs and these are the ones I have so far -
I have now started to play around with some of the shapes with tracing paper - here are some of my first attempts.

I want to try some different arrangements and changes of scale, I also haven't looked at positive and negative space/shapes. Time to get the tracing paper and pencil out ...