Beach Party

We have been having a welcome burst of sunshine recently so that might explain the beach theme of today's post!

When I visited the Festival of Quilts show in 2015 I naturally indulged in some retail therapy and one of my purchases was a canvaswork kit for a scissor keeper from the Sue Hawkins Needlework stand. Well, it has taken a bit longer than I anticipated but I finally have a finished Beach Hut scissor keeper.

The stitching of the canvaswork was pretty straightforward but the website wasn't wrong when it described making up the box shape as fiddly! I had it turned inside out a couple of times to make sure that I was stitching it up properly.

When it came to the instructions for the cord, I was completely stumped. There were no photos to accompany the text and the text just didn't make any sense to me at all. Fortunately I bought a braid making kit at the Knitting and Stitching Show in Olympia a couple of weeks ago, so this was the ideal opportunity to give it a whirl.

It was a pleasure to sit in the sunshine and manipulate the threads around the card to make this braid, even although it undoubtedly took a lot longer than the original instructions intended :)

Sitting in the sunny SW of France it is easy to agree with this sentiment, might be a bit more difficult to hold on to when I am back on the West Coast of Scotland! Still at least now I will have no excuse for losing scissors down the side of the sofa anymore!

That's my finish for this week's TGIFF, now it is your turn to link up and celebrate your finishes this week. As ever don't make this a solitary celebration click on your fellow linkers and leave a celebratory comment on their fabulous finishes. Grab the blog button and add it to your post so that your readers can join in the fun too.

An InLinkz Link-up

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