There have been a few challenges this week. The first was to myself, to finish my green redwork, and I managed to finish stitching the last egg late last night. Well, the ‘shells’ were finished last week, so it was a case of ‘decorating’ them. Only one was finished (French knots), two were partly done (tiny seeding and cross stitches), and both were a challenge to find matching thread. That leaves two to finish and five whole ones to do.
It is a very different beast from what I would do now. I have learnt so much since I started it, but I didn’t want to unpick my earlier work. It’s interesting to see the progress I have made. Firstly the French knots and the cross stitches don’t show up well on the beige linen background, and unfortunately they are next to each other, so I couldn’t balance them across the piece. I didn’t want to do the others so light, to contrast better with the background, having used stronger, brighter greens.
I’ve added tiny triangles, basically three little running stitches, single chain stitches, lazy daisy flowers, bigger seeding and straight stitch ‘flowers’. The partly finished ones, I think I have matched the thread or pretty close. Note to self, do not take all the thread for another project! Or make a note of what it is, brand and number, and how many strands of thread were used!
I’ll wash and press it before I put it away with the Easter decorations. For now, it’s on the kitchen table with a broken-off branch of beech I picked up in the woods nearly two weeks ago. I put it in a little vase and kept it topped up with water. The buds are fattening nicely, and before they open much more I need to put the tiny painted wooden eggs on it.
The Grasby Easter lockdown challenge #9 nearly didn’t get done. The Grasby group hopefully will have an exhibition this year, we were all working on it for last year, but of course it didn’t happen.
We had a deadline of the 31st March to finish our final piece, so I have been working away at that, which is now finished. Phew! Lots of experimentation and working out how I was going to execute it, but got there with a day or two to spare. The pieces we do for Grasby are not shown until they are exhibited, so watch this space for details. This took precedence over the lockdown challenge.
We had all had #9 in a pretty envelope which arrived towards the end of February, with a tiny fretwork egg on a mauve ribbon and the request to create something, anything on the theme of Easter – Pagan or Religious, using the colour of the ribbon. I opened it and read the instructions several times, but put it away not wanting to get side-tracked from my main piece. I had a few big ideas for the challenge, but not time to do them by the time the main piece was due.
But after last week’s painted ‘Fun-ky chickens’, and as I looked at the instructions yet again, it suddenly occurred that I could do a stitched ‘Fun-ky chicken’. I had the perfect little white plastic oval frame, nearly egg shaped, and the right size complimentary yellow piece of felt for the background. I couldn’t find the googly eyes that were my first thought (found them since!), but think the beads work better anyway: a handful of mauve and purple threads and I was off.
It was a quick piece, but at least I have managed to do all of the Grasby challenges. And Colin came up with the perfect title for it “Which came first?” (chicken or egg).
The lockdown challenges are all on Facebook under Grasby Embroiderers and some earlier work that has been exhibited too.
The final challenge(s) is one by a friend. Earlier in the week when the sun shone and it was warm and sunny, and we could finally meet up in gardens, I was showing Sally, a non-stitching friend, how she could make a patchwork cushion. I’d got out my quilt book, with photos of my work and how I’ve tackled some of my quilts. The first job (another one!) is to up-date it, photos need finding and printing, fabric samples and sketches, ideas gathering…… it is a useful resource and record of some of my work.
The second is to finish ‘my first quilt’. It was started in 1999, a memory quilt of an Easter visit to our dear late American friend Dottie in Tucson, Arizona. The sixteen patterned fabrics were chosen and bought in Michael’s, an art and craft hypermarket unlike anything we had in England at the time. A bigger, better Hobbycraft-style shop. Dottie’s niece Ginny took Miles and myself there, having dropped Colin at a ‘record shop’. We were there for literally hours, and I still felt I’d only scratched the surface of the place. I spent quite a lot too, but was sure Colin would have spent just as much or more in the record shop! I was not wrong.
We had nearly finished our shopping when I spotted a memory quilt hanging from the ceiling. I didn’t like quilts at this time, could see no point in cutting fabric into pieces and then stitching them back together! Most of what I had seen before this was a mish-mash of fabrics, hexagons hand-stitched together, and I was not impressed. But this memory quilt was done in beautiful, brightly patterned fabrics, carefully selected to make a coherent whole.
I was blown away by the idea of making one to commemorate our holiday of a life-time in America. We had fun choosing the fabrics to represent various aspects of the holiday; lots of Mexican food, including chillis, a trip to Old Tucson, Easter eggs, humming-birds, flowers, saguaro cacti, road signs, medical instruments (Dottie ended up in hospital for a couple of days with pneumonia while we were there), iguanas (we saw lots, and Ginny loved them), frogs to represent a friend of Dottie’s who also took us out for the day.
I bought eight plain brightly coloured fabrics to go with the patterns once we were home, and spent many hours playing with pieces of coloured paper working out which to put together, to make what I later found were traditional 9 square blocks. If only I’d known, I would have saved myself a lot of time. I even did triangles and have no idea how I worked out how to make them the right size to fit with the squares. Trial and error, probably.
I eventually finished the blocks and wanted sashing to represent the landscape, desert and saguaro cacti growing everywhere like we have trees here. So the sashing was a dull beige, with saguaros on the squares to make the intersections.
I then made one inch squares to make the lettering to say TUCSON at the top, and EASTER 1999 at the bottom, all paper-pieced together, with triangles to make the ‘R’s’.
I did blog about it long, long ago before the lettering was all stitched down, but I haven’t touched it since. Sally’s challenge to me is to finish it, having asked how long it would take me. But I’m not going to commit myself to the time scale!
I couldn’t get at it to show her, but have now managed to get it out. Now I need to find the fabric to do the saguaros on the corners.
Happy Easter to you all, green eggs have less calories than chocolate ones!
debbidipity 