Half finished stitching

I’ve picked up a couple of pieces that I’ve been procrastinating about this last week. Firstly the Deborah Mullins piece that we had as a workshop at Lincoln Embroiderers Guild (now Linconshire Textiles), in May 2019. Deborah had done a lot of preparation in advance making up a kit for each of us. There were several colour combinations to choose from, I picked the dark green and brick red felt (top left), which Deborah had hand-felted and tacked to a nice linen(?) backing. Each came with a range of Perlé 3 (thicker) and perlé 5, two colours of fine wire and well-written instructions.

We started with the sabaleh stitch, which is the chevron outlining around the colour changes of the felt, changing the thread colour every four stitches (each side); the closeness of the stitching is altered to get round the curves. The wire was bent into spirals and couched down. The top photo is how far I’d got at the end of the workshop.

I didn’t get back to it until sometime this summer, and finished off the sabaleh stitch around the outer colour change. Sadly Deborah died at the end of 2020. I played around with putting her name and dates in the red section of felt. I’ve known her since our son and her youngest two were babies, catching up spasmodically at various stitching events and exhibitions over the years once the children started school and she moved out of the area. In the end I decided that it would be best on the back of the piece somehow.

I have finally started working on the green wire on the red section of felt, starting with another spiral in one corner and then meandering around. It’s almost finished, but I ran out of thread to couch with, with only a couple of inches of the metal wire left to catch down. I need to look for a matching thread in good daylight. The wire catches the light beautifully and sparkles like beads.

Stitching with the wire was what I was procrastinating about, but once I got started again it wasn’t as difficult as I feared. I just had to be careful not to flick it around as I stitched and catch mine or anyone else’s eyes with it. It started off rather long, but I didn’t want to cut it!

The other piece I couldn’t remember what to do with was again from a workshop at Lincoln Guild with Marian Jackson. Unusually I hadn’t taken photos of her work to give me some ideas. Marion used sweet-wrappers on a dark felt background, layering the coloured silver papers, bits of organza and Angelina in an abstract way. I think we used Pritt stick or similar to hold them before stitching them down. I used running stitches in a Sylco to hold it down but, coming back to it, the Angelina especially was a bit flyaway. At the first meeting of Linconshire Textiles I spoke to Marian and asked her if she would send me a few photos for some ideas, which she kindly did.

I hadn’t remembered that some of her pieces had been machine stitched down. I found the perfect blue metallic thread that I had picked up in a “must have” bag at one of the stitching shows ages ago. There was no label of any kind on it, but it only broke once on the rows of straight stitch that I machined across the other way to the hand stitches, pretty good for a metallic and it has anchored everything down nicely.

It just needs some more beads and bling to finish it off, just the thing on a dull day or a dark night in front of the fire.

Grasby lockdown challenge #5

Goodies from Mary

Mary sent us an A4 envelope of goodies or ‘bits’ as she called them, as our starting point for #5, to do with as we wished. The background piece is a ‘made by Mary’ piece of fabric, with layers of all sorts on a piece of old white cotton sheeting(?), angelina, fleece, snippets of fabrics and thread, and silk tops all sandwiched together with a piece of organza on top. There were ,also silk cocoons, a beautiful piece of fine, drapey silk, a Sari strip, and a few other bits. All beautiful in their own right, none of which I wanted to cut up, hide or change beyond recognition.

Mary has done an ‘in house’ workshop for the group using this technique, a fun messy play-day it was too, using a special ‘glue’ to hold the layers together. I’ve not used any of mine yet, just stroking them and admiring their beauty when I come across them.

What to do with them, then, apart from just looking?

I considered this for a couple of weeks, and came to the conclusion that it should be something using as much of the ‘Mary made’ piece as possible. It was a bit bigger than A5 size, so I thought A6 notebook cover, but couldn’t find an unused one, and thought I could get one when I went shopping.

I decided that the piece needed some stitching to hold it together and stabilise it more. The layers are quite thick in places so machine stitching I felt would work better. I wanted a shiny thread to pick up some of sparkle from underneath. I offered up several that worked, but made my final decision on the only one that wasn’t still sealed, a lovely green one which picked up the green tones in the sandwich.

Previously I’ve never had much success using metallic threads on the machine, they tend to break fairly frequently which is frustrating. But I recalled a couple of tips that I’ve read, and I tried them: firstly, the thread coming straight off the reel, longer than putting it on the normal spool holder, so on a plastic stand with a long metal arm with a hook in the top; and secondly, to use a bigger stitch than you normally would. These seemed to do the trick.

I started stitching long swooping lines across the piece, and realised after a few crossing lines that the intersections looked like the circular patterns I had loved to do with a compass as a child. So I then started deliberately aiming for earlier crossing points. My bobbin thread ran out a couple of times (I was using up what was already on them), but the top metallic thread was fine. When it did finally break, I decide that was the point to stop.

While I had been machining, I had the idea that I could make the pages for a book, but the cover was a bit bumpy, and so not easy to work or write in without making a firmer inside cover.

I then had the idea of printing off my blog posts about the Grasby lockdown challenges, so that I would have a little book of them all together in one place, and photos of the responses of the rest of the group to each one.

Wrong layout for printing

This was not as simple to do as I expected, because they wouldn’t print off in a way I could easily use them. So, much fiddling and resizing to make the text as big as possible to be legible; then working out how to get four on a page in the right order to print on both sides (our current printer doesn’t print back to back so the paper had to be flipped the right way for the second side), so that the pages would follow on logically when cut, folded and put together. It was crazy, on several occasions I thought I had cracked it, but no, I’d put the same page in twice, they were in the wrong order, etc, etc. When I finally sorted out the first one (8 pages) I thought the others would be easy, but no, they were 16 pages so they had to be set in a different order for the printer. So again ages for #2, but #3 and #4 were a bit quicker, only for the ink to run out on the last page!

Experimenting with sizing

Finally sorted – ready to print

Working out where each page needs to go to print correctly

It was certainly a challenge, and I have decided not to make them into a book until the challenges have finished, as I will do a new pamphlet for each challenge. For now, each lockdown challenge is a separate pamphlet, which may prove to be the best way, so that it is not a book cover, but a little folder.

Finished pamphlets

So back to the cover. I cut the piece as big as possible, and found a suitable piece for the lining, a green that was not only the right colour to pick up some of the tones in the ‘Mary made’ but exactly the right size to fold up the bottom to make a pocket to sit the pamphlets in! It just need trimming to straighten the edges.

Perfect colour and size, just needed a fraction off a couple of sides to straighten it up

I used the finished pamphlets to check the size of the pocket and to make sure they wouldn’t fall out. Then I ironed across the bottom and folded in a neat hem at the top, ready to machine stitch.

Checking size of pocket

Folded and ironed ready to stitch

I did three rows of straight stitch with the same green metallic thread to hold down the hem of the pocket. I then did a line of straight stitch all the way round the edge, working on the lining side to hold it all in position. Working on the right side, I did three rows of zigzag on the widest setting and longest stitch. I decided not to chance satin stitch as I thought it would test the thread too much, and was pleased I hadn’t as it broke several times as it was.

Inside stitched across the top of the pocket and attached to the front.

I zigzagged the length of sari silk several times to make a cord which I threaded through the silk cocoons to make a tie to hold it together.

Finished front

Finished back

Close up of front

Thank you, Mary, for my goodie bag. I’ve loved the stitching, but the biggest challenge has been the computer and printing aspects! I was determined that it wasn’t going to beat me and I’m pleased to have a little memento of all our challenges. Now to make a pamphlet of this blog post!

As usual you can see the responses from the others in the group on Grasby Embroiderers Facebook page.