A walk in the park!

Several months ago the Embroiderers Guild sent out a request for contributions to a forthcoming exhibition to be based around books. The exhibition would be called Page 17, although the solicited exhibits could be based upon anything to do with a book not just the 17th page. The exhibits would be on display at the Knitting and Stitching shows in Harrogate and London and, it was hoped, would also travel to other venues later in the year.

Existing works that might suit the theme were to be submitted by the end of April for consideration and a deadline of the end of August was set for exhibits created specifically for the exhibition. At the time I think this distinction created some confusion as I saw several comments on how little time there was to submit a piece. Undaunted I sent off an email to say that I was interested in submitting a new piece and then started thinking ... and thinking ... and thinking :)

You will not, I am sure, be surprised to know that I finally finished my piece for the exhibition the day before the submission deadline!

When our boys were little one of their favourite books was Lynley Dodd's Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy, and now it is a favourite of our gorgeous grandson too. So, I decided to have some fun with the characters in the book for my embroidery. I knew that my drawing skills were not up to reproducing the characters exactly so decided to show bits of them as if they were being seen through holes in the fence.

Each of the dogs in the book has an accompanying description, so Muffin McLay is like a bundle of hay.

My Muffin McLay is a bit curly for hay but I think he is still recognisable! I used a New to Me stitch for Muffin, drizzle stitch, which is apparently Brazilian in origin. It was great fun to stitch and is definitely a great addition to my stitching repertoire.

I stitched all of the dogs, apart from Hairy Maclary, on to a cotton backing fabric then joined the sky and fence fabric together to place over the top before adding Hairy Maclary and the fence and tree detail.

I spent a while trying to work out how best to deal with the cut-outs for the embroidery and finally used another New to Me technique.

Spray starch sprayed into the aerosol lid

then painted on to the seam allowance of the circle cut-outs and ironed in place before being placed in front of the embroidered cotton. To my surprise it worked!

I wanted Hairy Maclary to stand proud of the rest of the embroidery so used wool on canvas and another New to Me stitch, Turkey Stitch, to create his fluffy self. (Apologies for the somewhat blurred photo I was running out of time when I took it!)

I was very pleased with how it all turned out and when the piece has finished travelling it will be another addition to the gallery on the gorgeous grandson's wall!

If you haven't read the books the characters are from the left;

• Schnitzel von Krumm with a very low tum
• Muffin McLay like a bundle of hay
• Bitzer Maloney all skinny and bony
• Bottomley Potts covered in spots
• Hercules Morse as big as a horse

and Hairy Maclary from Donaldson's Dairy :)

 Linking up to Crazy Mom Quilts

Making an exhibition of myself!

Despite the title of this post, I haven't been going around embarrassing myself, well not to my knowledge anyway :)

I have, however, finished and handed over my piece for the forthcoming Capability Brown exhibition to be held at Wallington , a National Trust property in Northumberland near to where Lancelot 'Capability' Brown, the celebrated landscape gardener was born. The exhibition is organised in conjunction with the Northumberland Embroiderers Guild to celebrate the 300th Anniversary of Brown's birth, and is part of a nationwide celebration that includes dance and theatre productions as well as displays of stitch and textile art at venues that have a link to Capability Brown's work.

In my local EG branch, we were invited to create an exhibition piece to be displayed on an A4 canvas that depicted an aspect of Brown's work or legacy.

Having visited Wallington on numerous occasions I hunted through my photos for inspiration and finally settled on this image taken on a walk in the grounds on a winter day.

Inspired by an EG workshop with Beryl Frank, I uploaded this image and another from the walk to Spoonflower and with a bit of tweaking ended up with these two fabrics.

The aim was to use the Spoonflower fabric as a frame for a canvaswork insert. So, armed with some graph paper and colouring pencils the design for the canvas was born.

Of course, I couldn't resist incorporating some gorgeous hand-dyed threads from 21st Century Yarns and a sprinkling of seed beads!

Put that all together and you end up with this.

Still Waters - my entry to Landscapes of Capability Brown

The exhibition runs from June 11th to October 30th so if you are in the area you have plenty of time to enjoy a day out catching the display and ending a wander around the grounds with a coffee and cake in the Clocktower Cafe :)

If you are in the UK, but Northumberland is a bit too far away, do check out the other exhibition venues around the country here there will be lots of wonderful examples of stitch and textile art to inspire you I am sure.

Linking up to Crazy Mom Quilts and

Inspiring embellishment

Last month my Embroiderers Guild branch hosted a Felt Work workshop run by a local textile artist, Joanna O'Neill. Joanna is a fascinating character who, in addition to her textile work, is a dog listening practitioner and a published fiction author. You can find out more about her here

Most fascinating of all though for me were the wonderful samples of her felt work that Joanna shared with the group.

This reverse applique piece was probably my favourite, isn't it beautiful?

I loved the colours in this one too.

Joanna's samples demonstrated the many different methods that she used to create her felt and you can see the difference in the density of the two pieces above, which was due to the length of time taken over the felting process and the nature of the original material.

As well as embellishing the felted material with embroidery as shown above, Joanna also uses Shisha mirrors to embellish her work.

This piece was much admired by everyone present, although the other pieces shown below were just as delightful.

Naturally this being an Embroiderers Guild workshop we were given the chance to have a go at creating something similar ourselves!

As you can see some of my fellow embroiderers took to felt embroidery like a duck to water :)

The small purple square in the bottom left hand corner was created by a friend who was struggling to come up with a concept for her piece, then we remembered the recent death of Prince and his hit song "Purple Rain" and realised that she had her concept!

We had been told to bring along scraps of fabric, ribbon and threads as well as our squares of felt, so my attempt to emulate Joanna incorporated a scrap of tweed-like fabric brought back from Latvia, as well as beads and embroidery.

As you can see I didn't get very far on the day, but eventually this piece will represent a seascape taken from our holiday on the west coast of Ireland. I am not accepting any bets though on when eventually will be!

The Hardhome Embroidery

So far you have only seen this

and then this

and this

but at last I can show you what I have been working on!

A family crest as part of the Hardhome Embroidery created by the Embroiderers Guild in partnership with Royal School of Needlework, Hand & Lock and Fine Cell Work for the launch of Game of Thrones Series 5 boxset this month!

The request for participants from the Embroiderers Guild dropped in to my inbox at the end of last year and well, being a huge Game of Thrones fan, how could I resist?? Of course then I began to worry about whether I was up to the challenge, and continued to worry about that throughout the whole process I might add!

 

https://embroiderersguild.com/index.php?page_no=869

As you can see the final piece is huge, 5m (nearly 17') long by 4m (13.6') high so my contribution is just a tiny part of that, but no less thrilling all the same. (second down from the top left hand corner in case you are wondering!) The timescale for the project was very tight given that the completed embroideries had to be returned to the organisers by March 2nd at the latest. My poor fingers didn't quite know what had hit them :)

My adult sons are hugely impressed that Mum now has a connection (however tenuous!) with Game of Thrones so it was worth the sore fingers for that alone!

The Hardhome Embroidery will go on tour in the coming months so I am hoping that it ventures far enough North for me to get a chance to go and see the complete banner and maybe mention in passing that I was involved in its production :)

Of course if you get a chance to see it too I would love to hear what you think of it, the descriptions that I have seen of the different elements of the panel sound amazing so I am sure that they will be worth seeing.

You can see some of the progress shots here and a list of contributors to the project here.

One of my three projects for the 100 Day challenge done and dusted!

Linking up to

30 days and counting!

Apparently it is 30 days since Jen started her 100 day challenge over at Quilter in the Closet, so time for the first check in.

For the challenge participants were asked to nominate three projects to finish in the 100 days timescale, you can see my original post for the challenge here

So, has there been any progress?

Well, yes, surprisingly, there has.

Thanks to a couple of sessions at my new quilt group I have a half-pieced top for the Up, up and away quilt from the Sunday Morning Quilts book. There are still lots of 2.5" blocks to be cut and pieced into strips, but at least from here on in the strips get shorter every time :)

The canvaswork centre for my Embroiderers Guild exhibition piece has now been drawn out on graph paper and stitching has started. Of course I couldn't resist using this as an opportunity to purchase some sparkly new threads, so they have been added to the mix too!

And finally, my secret (and very scary!) EG project has also been started. That is my first ever attempt at whipped chain stitch above and I am really pleased at how it turned out. I am keeping my fingers crossed that the rest of this piece will be as pleasing as I think there are going to be lots of New to Me stitches in there by the end. Of course the opportunity to purchase even more sparkly threads couldn't be passed up here either, hence that lovely hand-dyed ribbon for the whipped stitches: )

So, that's my progress after 30 days, I have a feeling that these projects will be going down to the wire, don't you?

Head on over to Jen's to see how everyone else has risen to the challenge.

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Challenging myself in 2016

Have you heard of Jen's 100 day challenge?

 

 Knowing how many New Year's resolutions fall by the wayside or get diluted because a whole year is plenty of time to complete them, Jen came up with the idea of a 100 day challenge. The thinking behind it is that 100 days is not too long to stay motivated for but long enough to complete a few big challenges. 

So Jen has challenged her fellow bloggers to 

1) Pick 3 specific Quilty/Craft goals - finish some UFO's?  try something new?  make that baby quilt?  declutter/destash?  easy/hard?  Doesn't matter, just be specific.  Specificity helps so we don't justify changing our goals midyear or rationalizing that we generally completed them when we only tried.

Naturally being the caring bloggers that we are there will be support along the way from fellow challengers and just to keep that motivation going, check-ins too. 

So, here are the three challenges that I have decided to go for in the next 100 days!

 

First up a Bee quilt that I said I was determined to finish in February last year! The quilt is Up, Up and Away from the book Sunday Morning Quilts by Amanda Jean Nyberg and Cheryl Arkison. The quilt consists of 589 white 2.5" blocks with a scrappy triangle in the corner. Thanks to my Bee mates in the Sunday Morning Quilts bee I have almost half of the quilt top pieced. I have now run out of Bee blocks so the rest is down to me, which means that I need to cut out and piece 235 blocks! 

You can probably see why this has hung about for so long :) 

 

 

 My second challenge is to complete my project for the Embroiderers Guild Capability Brown exhibition in May. I have the fabric, courtesy of Spoonflower now all I have to do is design and stitch the canvaswork insert! The final piece will be exhibited at Wallington which would definitely be a first for me, so if that is not enough incentive to get this finished I don't know what is :)

My third challenge is also embroidery related but I can't show you a photo of it yet, so have made do with this embroidered card! The project is a request sent out recently from the Embroiderers Guild to contribute to a large banner. I have never done anything like that before, but before I could talk myself out of it I replied to the email to say that I was interested in taking part. I am sure that I will be intimidated by all the wonderful embroiderers taking part, but that is a worry for another day!

So these are my challenges for the next 100 days, they should keep me busy :)

If you fancy challenging yourself too, head on over to Quilter in the Closet to check out the details. 

Playing with abstract

Last weekend I took a class run by the local branch of the Embroiderers' Guild, to work with silk fibres and stitching to create a semi-abstract landscape. Well out of my comfort zone as you can imagine :)

The class tutor was the wonderful and very patient Pat Ashton Smith who brought along several examples of her beautiful work to encourage and inspire us.

Having never taken an embroidery class, and certainly never with a group of talented embroiderers I was a bit nervous to say the least, but the ladies in the class couldn't have been more welcoming.

We had been asked to bring along a photo for inspiration and I chose a view from our recent Silk Route trip as my source of inspiration.

This photo was taken from our hotel balcony and shows the spectacular mountains surrounding the city of Almaty. We were fortunate enough to drive up into the mountains later that day and it was equally as stunning looking down on the city.

Armed with my photo and some of these lovely threads bought in a haberdashery in Samarkand, I set off to the class.

Pat provided us each with a pack of Silk Cocoon strippings, which sound much less attractive than they were! They are apparently what is left of the cocoon when the silk thread is removed and are a fluffy, soft handful of fibre. The strippings also contain a natural glue within them, which would be utilised later in the creation of the piece.

We were given free rein in the glorious jumble that was Pat's silk fibre stash, and it was as much fun as it sounds! Having picked our silks we started pulling apart our Silk Cocoon strippings to create the base of our textured landscape.

The base is built up of layers of Silk Cocoon strippings, which are then overlaid with the teased out silk fibres. The base is quite deep at this stage and certainly doesn't look like something that will lend itself to embroidery.

The magic though is in the next stage.

 The base and fibres are sandwiched between two sheets of parchment paper and ironed with a medium-hot iron. The heat of the iron releases the natural glue in the Silk Cocoon strippings and bonds the fibres together. This was when the ladies amongst us who had been particularly generous with the application of their silk fibres learnt to rue that decision! The silk fibres only bonded where they came into direct contact with the cocoon strippings, so heavily overlapping sections were almost impossible to bond. This wasn't particularly a problem if the loose fibres were intended to be stitched down with the embroidery, but wasn't so great if they were to make up a large part of a hedge, or sky.

Fortunately, most of my fibres bonded well enough and those that were maybe a bit loose would eventually be covered up with the embroidery for the trees.

So, here is how my piece is looking now! At the class I added the seed stitching for the mountain crevices and some back stitch for the sky. At home I have enjoyed using some variegated threads purchased at the class to add in the trees, I have no idea what the stitch I have used for them is called as I discovered it in a quilting and embroidery book that I bought in Tallinn, so the text is all in Estonian! I am sure someone will rectify that when I go to the next class though :)

Next up is some more stitching for the bare branches in the foreground and to work out how to add the magpie! All suggestions welcome :)