We've had some lovely sunsets again. I went down to the bay at 5pm and low tide.
It had been a very gloomy day. There was hardly anyone walking along the promenade, just a jogger and a dog walker. It was just too cold for the usual bustle, but very pretty with the sunset reflecting off the shallow water on the mudflats.
These soft Paterna wool colours so reminded me of candy floss. Candy floss and the days spent in the sun eating big swirls of freshly made candy floss on sticks on Durban's South Beach. No photos of that candy floss, but I did come across this very old photo of Durban South Beach with its golden sand, gorgeous blue rolling waves and the Bluff in the distance.
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| Durban and the old South Beach* |
That jogged a memory of the wonderful beach holiday I had in Hermanus with my cousins. Each day we could choose either ice cream or a selection of penny sweets to spend our carefully guarded our pocket money on. Usually we would choose from the tempting display of sweets, carry them off in a paper packet and sit basking in the sun on the beach savouring them. Like the candy floss, most of those sweets were pastel in colour.
After considering names for my pincushion and chatting to my daughter about these memories, Pastel Candies seemed apt. She'd reminded me that in Australia 'sweets' are called 'lollies' or 'candies'.
I was delighted by this lovely, carefully chosen gift from my daughter overseas. It's a lustrous pink, Thai silk. And it matches the wools beautifully.
'Till next time, happy stitching!
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* Photo source: 'Who remembers old Durban', Facebook
This deep purple Agapanthus Blackjack is the flower of the year at Chelsea Flower Show. It was developed by de Wet plant breeders in South Africa. Congratulations!
I can see why the name Blackjack was chosen. It's the most extraordinary colour.
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| Andy de Wet with Agapanthus Blackjack (Courtesy: Boom in Business) |
It's lovely to have this snippet of good news from South Africa among the stories of the difficulties the country is facing with the ongoing extensive power cuts.
I've been binding another round embroidery frame, or hoop, with cotton twill tape. Binding improves the grip of the frame on the embroidery fabric and keeps it taut in the frame. Here are some tips to make the process easier.
I used laundry pegs to hold the tape in place. Both my plastic pegs and the stainless steel ones worked well.
While wrapping the tape around the wooden hoop, control the roll of tape by unwinding a short length and then insert a pin into the roll. This way you keep it from taking on a life of its own and rolling away onto the floor - way out of reach!
I usually overlap the tape as I bind around the hoop because I have found that the tape doesn't easily shift on the frame. Overlapping it does however use a fair bit of tape.
So, this time to save on my dwindling supply of tape, I'm placing each wrap next to the previous one, without any overlap. I've stitched a few stitches on the inside of each wrap to keep the tape in place. You may just be able to see the stitches if you click on the photo below and enlarge it.
If you are planning on binding a frame, I hope these tips will be helpful. For an in-depth tutorial on binding a hoop, have a look at Mary Corbet's blog here on Needle 'n Thread. Mary also has a subsequent update on the tutorial which you can see by clicking here. There's plenty of useful detail in the tutorials especially if binding a hoop is something new to you.
I've just returned from a wonderful trip to visit my daughter and family in Dubai. I took a small stitching project with me and picked it up only once! Now to recover from the jetlag and get back to some embroidery.
'Till next time, happy stitching - perhaps with your newly bound frame!
This 1820 sampler is missing from a museum. Read the post on the Thistle Threads blog here to find out more about it and perhaps help with the search.
Here's the sprig of flowers I embroidered as part of the guild's stitch along, and which I wrote about in this blog post here.
I finished it into a needle book with two felt pages.
I used a DMC pearl thread # 8 to outline the spray of flowers with Holbein stitch. It happened to be the exact same colour as the pink thread of the petals. Both threads were passed on to me years apart and by different people. What a coincidence!
The lazy daisy bullion stitches of the petals look as though they could be the petals of Barberton daisies. Barberton daisies, also known as Gerbera jamesonii, and indigenous to Barberton in South Africa, were the first gerbera to be scientifically described (Wikipedia).
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| Gerberas and chrysanthemums |
'Till next time, happy stitching!
This is not exactly embroidery, but it does have extraordinary embroidery detail. The lace cravat and sleeve ruffle that are hewn out of solid marble are captivating. Then there's the wonderful detail on the fringe and the embroidered buttons.
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| Courtesy Wikipedia Commons |
The sculptor was Louis Phillipe Mouchy.
There's an informal stitch along (SAL) at the Embroiderers' Guild of Queensland on the first Saturday of the month. It takes place during the regular meeting and each month there's a different sprig of flowers to stitch, with expert guidance on the stitches. The SAL is led by Deborah Love and there's also a lovely friendly exchange of ideas and information among the members.
I took along a box of well-used and much-treasured threads that had been passed on to me, knowing that I would need just a little bit of each colour for the first flower spray. I plan to make small articles rather than a cushion or a large picture.
The SAL started off with lazy daisy bullion stitch. (Also called 'Bullion Knot - Detached Chain' or 'Bullion - Lazy Daisy'.) After a few less than successful attempts at bullion stitch in the past, I have studiously avoided it - despite the excellent tutelage of Lynne Laver of the Cape Embroiderers' Guild whom we fondly refer to as the Bullion Queen. But, it was time to tackle this tricky stitch again - with an added lazy daisy stitch.
Well, I struggled. The needle just wouldn't pull through the loops. I tried a smaller milliner's needle. I tried wrapping the thread a little looser around the needle. I tried giving the needle a slight twist when caught on the wraps. Nothing made a much of a difference. Eventually I began to blame the thread. After all, a bad workman always blames his tools, or in this case, the thread. It seemed unusable.
But, thread conditioner came to the rescue! I separated out my three strands, pulled each one over the surface of the thread conditioner, then I put them together and pulled for one more coating.
Not only did the needle slide through the wraps more smoothly, but it was much easier to thread the needle too! The thread conditioner also ironed out some of the wrinkles in the thread making it less springy and easier to work with.
I would guess that the thread is very old. Natural fibres decompose over time especially in less than perfect conditions. Light, heat and moisture all play a part in the process. Perhaps some of the chemical bonds in this cotton have begun to deteriorate causing it to lose some of its smooth finish?
Although the Thread Heaven conditioner solved my problem, I would be wary of using this particular thread on a big important project. I still have a way to go for achieving really neat bullions, but I have made some progress. At least I have gotten over the mental block I had about doing them.
'Till next time, happy stitching!
I've drawn up a pattern for the little pulled thread sampler I've been working on in the background and the pattern is now available in the Etsy shop. You can see more about it by clicking here.
The idea for the embroidery originally grew from trying out a piece of pulled thread embroidery without the benefit of an embroidery frame. You can read more about that in this blog post here. Although it was a novel experience and quite successful, I am more familiar with embroidering in a frame and since completing the sampler, I have reverted to using one.
Originally, I wanted to see how different or difficult it was to work various stitches while holding the embroidery in my hand and I chose several popular pulled thread stitches for my test sampler. I also love doing a variety of different embroidery stitches. Any excuse to add another stitch! I can see why through the years samplers of all types have had an endless appeal to embroiderers.
It's simply fun to use lots of different stitches and watch how each one turns out as you stitch it - without the distraction of a design. The stitches speak for themselves.
Once the stitching was done and it seemed like a nice little project to do, I started drawing up a pattern. But, there were quite a few delays. Besides Christmas and having family to stay, one was that the software I use suddenly had a glitch. That took quite a while to iron out. Another was that photos of the finished pincushion proved a challenge. The first few with my trusty point-and-shoot camera were disappointing, so Rod took some with his phone.
They were much better than my first two attempts but the rich inky background turned out to be rather overwhelming. In the end, we had a bright day and I found a bright spot on the patio to take the photos. I settled on the white background I started out with and used those photos for the pattern.
The pattern has instructions and stitch diagrams for a collection of pulled thread stitches, worked in bands across the linen. There's also a pretty row of daisies in-between and the embroidery is finished off as a pincushion. It's a digital pattern and easy to download from the link that Etsy sends with your receipt.
I tried out colours and stitches for the next rounds, and after stitching and unpicking some of them, I remembered to take this photograph.
