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A little slow stitching

A little slow stitching

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I like slow stitching. Just stitching for fun and to relax. No big purpose or major projects. Just do it as you feel like it. This suits me as I am not a great stitcher and I can pick it up and put it down without any guilt. I belong to a group on Facebook and some people are amazing artists and some just do random stitching on a piece of cloth and everything in between.

I decided I wanted t make some snowflakes and at least one tree. I had seen an interesting one in my Pinterest suggestions. To this end, I took the ripped-up sheet out of the donations box. You know what they say if you want to know what you intended for something just give it away and next week you will know what you needed it for. I was lucky that we are very slow with these things and they hadn’t made it to their destination. I am still not sure what the original idea was for these wide strips of sheet.

One piece was a little grubby looking so I chose it for the proof of concept (practice) piece. I have a nice small free-standing embroidery hoop I got at a garage sale (I think). It means it’s hands-free and can sit beside my chair and the hoop doesn’t go missing.

 

Snowflakes. I drew 3 stars onto the cloth to use as patterns. I used some thick gold polyester thread from Gutermann.

PATERN FOR SNOWFLAKES gold thread spokes for stitching snowflakes Finished gold stitched snowflake

That was easy enough so I moved on to some clean fabric

I drew the stars a little bigger and I did gold again

Patterns for snowflakes gold snowflake partially donegold snowflake finished

Then I moved on to what would be the problem thread. It is something I picked up because it was shiny but it has no markings it is just on a plane cardboard tube.  It’s a copper/bronze kind of colour and it is terrible to work with. it seems to be a wrapped thread and it kept breaking. There are a lot more knots in the back of this one. and there was a lot more cursing with the rethreading of the needle. I would have liked to add more to this but I was done with the thread.

bronze stitched snow flake

 

Next was some nice silvery embroidery thread. DMC rayon S712. I used 3 strands. It was very nice to use.

silver stitched snowflake

 

And here they are together

3 stitched snow flakes together

I switched back to the practice cloth to work on the tree. this is the trunk( obviously) I tried to do varying lengths of stitches to help it look more like bark. It is very hard to deliberately make random stitch lengths.

brown stitched tree trunk brown stitched treetrunk close up

 

This is what the back looks like where the backstitching is. I think I like it better for bark. The problem is I am having a hard time wrapping my head around doing backstitch upside down. It probably has another name with you do it that way.

back side of stitched tree trunk backside of stitched tree trunk, close up

Next is the evergreen bows. I will see how that goes. As I said it’s slow stitching.

Snowflake Holiday Cards

Snowflake Holiday Cards

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Every year we have a card exchange on the Felting and Fiber Studio forum. Whoever wants to participate signs up, we choose partners and those partners exchange a hand made card. This year I had two partners as we had an odd number of people, so I made two cards. I like to do more of a winter card rather than a specific holiday card. So this year’s card was all about snow and snowflakes.

 

I started with a piece of felt that I had stamped with the spiral stamp shown above and then drawn on with thickened dye. I attempted to over dye the felt but it wouldn’t take any more dye. The photo on the left shows the back side of this piece of felt. (I forgot to take a photo before I fused the sheer fabric on the front.) I decided that I would stitch snowflakes over the stamped spirals with the lines in between stitched to look like frost or jagged ice. But the color wasn’t too good so I looked in my stash and found some sheer fabric in blues and purples that already had fusible on the back.

So I fused the sheer fabric down. I have started the free motion machine stitching in the photo above. I found the easiest way to stitch the snowflakes  was to get the 6 or 12 radiating lines down first and then add the rest of the structure. You can see that the one on the left that didn’t have the radiating lines turned out really wonky. But this didn’t really matter as it will be covered in the next step. This piece of felt is big enough for two cards so it will be cut down to size in a later step.

Here’s the piece after I stitched all the snowflakes. I was a little sad to cover these up. They do show through but not really giving you the full scope of the stitching.

Then I found some more small bits of sheer fabric that I added over the stitching to give more color.

This is hard to see but there is a very sheer, shiny “fabric” that I stamped with acrylic paint. I am not sure what this fabric is, it looks a little like Lutradur but is more shiny and more open “weave” than the other Lutradur I have. I can’t remember where I got it. That is why I need to use stuff up. It’s bad when you have no idea what the stuff is, where you got it or what it’s original use was. So use stuff up!

I then fused the top layer over the variety of colored sheers and then cut the cards down to size. I machine stitched around the printed snowflake for the top layer and then zig zag stitched around the edges of the card.

I only had brown card blanks and I didn’t like the look of the snowflakes against the brown background. So I used two of my numerous colored papers that worked with the colors in the pieces. I glued the fabric card down to the paper and then fused the paper to the card blanks. I mailed these two cards off to Ann and Diane. Hopefully, they will like them. Unfortunately, there is a postal strike in Canada and it may be a while before the cards arrive.

Do you make your own cards? We’d love to hear about it over on the forum if you do!