Winter Dog Berries

Here's my latest 5" x 7" framed textile piece. All the dog berries are French knots using Valdani threads. The sky is hand dyed and the tree is made from burlap. The inspiration for stitching Dog Berries came from the view of all the Dog Berry trees I can see from my kitchen and studio windows.

Under the Sea

My latest art piece, Under the Sea, is a combination of free motion stitching and hand embroidery. Valdani Threads were used for the fly stitch and French knots. The background is Bali Batik. The piece is custom framed 5" x 7" with a black metal frame. The mat is a bright white but I couldn't quite get it right in the photo! An unframed version is also included below.

The hardest thing, is coming up with titles for my pieces.

Stitching!!

In honour of World Embroidery Day, I hope you managed to do some stitching. It was 31C in the shade at my brother-in-laws house here in the valley, NS , so I sat out on the deck and stitched for a short while.

Now for your pleasure, here are a few stitching links:

• Let's make a hussif tutorial (lots of stitching projects)
• Feeling Stitchy
• Stitch School
• Mary Corbet's Needle 'n Thread
• Sublime Stitching
• Embroidery as Art
• Racaire's Embroidery and Needlework
• DMC Threads
• Polka and Bloom
• French Knots
• Make It Coats
• Stitchin Fingers

My friend, Verna, made this beautiful Temari Ball for my birthday mid July.

Daisies and Dandelion

A few posts ago, I wrote about a piece of wall art that I had completed as a donation to the Cabot Quilt Guild for the Mother's Day weekend quilt show. It is part of a silent auction. Well, here is the completed piece. It is framed 8" x 10".

The sky is hand dyed satin (this fabric gives a lovely lustre to the sky). The green hills / grass are strips of commercial fabric that have been stitched with the sewing machine. The tree trunk and branches are thread painted and sewn onto the background. The foliage is stitched on by machine to give a 3-D affect. The daisies were hand stitched and then added to the picture (again, the flowers are in 3-D). The dandelions are French knots. Most of my landscapes have dandelions somewhere in them (unless they are winter scenes). When I was a child, I would pick these flowers as a present for my mother. She would accept them with a smile.

Latest Work

I just finished another piece of wall art. It's a donation for a silent auction later in May. At this time, I'm just showing a small corner of the piece. The 'rock' is silk that was printed from my computer. Refer HERE for information on printing onto fabric. The daisies were embroidered individually and hand stitched in place. The orange flowers are French knots. In the completed landscape there is a hand dyed sky, hills and a large tree with foliage. The skeleton tree was thread painted onto organza. Foliage was added after it was placed on the background.

Back Garden 05 - Work In Progress

Yesterday was a marathon day for working on this piece. This morning I put some of the last hand embroidery stitches in place. I have to do a bit more machine stitching on some foilage and it will be finished - well, the framing still has to be done!  Here's a bit of yesterdays progress. I wanted to add poppies to the garden. In the summer, it is loaded with them along the fence and over into the corner. They migrated from the garden behind this one. I decided to take a short cut in the top photo by making the poppies from red silk with French knots for the centers. But they did not look right so back to the sewing machine. I experimented with free motion stitching on red organza. I'm pleased with the outcome. I'm not looking for photo realistic flowers but representations of them. The daisies were all hand done on a wash away interfacing and hand stitched in place. I've used daisies like these in a number of my landscapes. The fence is from white cotton that I painted over with white paint. I found that the fabric before painting is transparent and that wouldn't do for a 'wooden' fence.

Happy Stitching

This afternoon was for relaxing! I spent some time catching up with blogs I read. My focus was on hand stitching - something I hope to do more of in 2012. Several years ago I took part in a three year, 5 level hand embroidery course. I was not a lover of crewel work and stitching with wool. However, I came across some Jacobean leaves by Kelly Fletcher, on the Feeling Stitchy blog. I just may do some of these this year! Feeling Stitchy has some wonderful stuff.

Also check out the following:
Mary Corbet's Needle 'n Thread
Stitchin Fingers
Hand Embroidery Network (HEN)
Curiosities 808 (from Hawaii) - not just crochet
Racaire's Embroidery & Needlework (Ausrtia)
DMC Threads with Emma Broidery
Polka & Bloom
French-Knots: all things stitchy
Hand Embroidery from Sadalas
Pin Tangle


Hand & Machine Embroidery by Judy Cooper

3-D Felting

A few posts ago, I wrote about felting with Caroline Lindsay from the UK. Well, I finally finished the two pieces I did. On the green vase, I put on decorative yarns and seed beads. The bowl has decorative yarns but instead of using beads, I created some French knots using metallic yarn. I am pleased with the results of these two pieces.

The Dandelion

What to write about? That is sometimes a dilemma. However . . . I just checked one of the blog updates and came across some interesting embroidery. This is the time of year we see lots and lots of dandelion flowers growing. Did I say flower - well those yellow weeds you see everywhere. My mother has often said that when she goes not to waste money on flowers but to just pick a few old dandelions for her. Morbid, I know, as she is alive and kicking at 88, but when I was a wee child, I picked many a yellow dandelion and presented them to her. In fact, all of my landscapes have a few yellow French knots to represent those flowers.
You can see an embroidered dandelion here. This is not a free pattern but I thought it was interesting. But you will find a nice embroidery pattern from Devon Bear Designs and another one from Robert Kaufman.      Here's a small dandelion fibre art quilt to see.

Straw Needles

I was just reading about different stitches and needles to use for embroidery. Most stitches can be created by using regular embroidery needles. However, according to Mary Corbet, using the right needle is the key to making perfect French Knots and Bullion Knots. On her blog she says that using a straw needle or milliner's needle is the perfect tool for making these stitches. If you have any of these on hand, you will notice that the shape of the straw needle is different from other needles. There is no bulge around the eye therefore making the shaft and the eye the same size the full extent of the needle. So when you pull the needle through a series of thread wraps, it goes through easily without the eye getting caught up in the wraps. Check out the rest of her article and see a picture of straw needles.

A couple of years ago, I did a three year hand embroidery course. Over the months, one of the class members kept saying that she only joined the class to learn how to make French Knots. This got to be a bit of a class chuckle. After the course was finally finished, we had an exhibit of all our work. We called it, "All I ever wanted to learn was French Knots". In fact most of the ladies who took this course still meet every Thursday evening to stitch, thus the name FETE (friends every Thursday evening).

Tanja Berlin has a lot of information on her site about embroidery needles.
Check out Victorian Embroidery and Crafts for information of selecting the right needle for your project.