Splash of Colour…

 

Three fabulously pink hyacinths in my kitchen, filling the whole house with their sweet scent.

 

 

A rainbow of new perle threads purchased at the weekend.  No2 thinks I’m quite mad, keep rearranging them into satisfying rows of colour.  He has no appreciation of these things!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I have no idea what I will use them for.  Yet.  But I am confident inspiration will strike.  Possibly in the form of French Knots…

Check out more Splashes of Colour here.

4 :: And so it begins…

As usual, come December, all the hand-made gifts that have been swirling around my head for the last six months start to come to fruition.

 

A new venture this year for me.  One that puts into practice the classes I went to back here and here.

 

E is for...

...embroidery...   extra embellishment to a custom cushion...

...edging stitches in bright orange thread...

...or perhaps for a little girl called Ella.  A present from her Godmother and made by me!

Another cushion...

I've been scrap-busting again!

And embroidering with variegated floss...

...adding beads because I've heard that little girls like that sort of thing...

...playing with my new sewing machine, experimenting with the different stitches.  Thank you List Writer for your recommendation.

A little bit of everything...

In my now customary way, I couldn't resist making some cushions out of the scrap from Harry and Max's quilts.

Ages ago, I saw this great tutorial by Aneela at Comfort Stitching and knew that I would like to give it a go. It sat around in my head for a while and then the idea was born to make these cushions.  I have never 'lowered the dogs' on my machine before and taking off the foot took a bit of nerve.  I practised on some scrap for a while  ages until I found the confidence to put needle to fabric.

I'm really liking the scrappy, sketchy look to this.   A real departure from my usual standards of neatness.  There will be more projects like this in the future.

I had a ball with the bondaweb!  I found a fun font, which I enlarged then transferred to fabric.  At first, I tried machine embroidering it on to the scrappy panel, but it didn't really stand out enough so I decided to put into practice a new stitch I learnt at my embroidery workshop last Saturday.  (You can read about our day here and here!)  This is palestrino stitch - my new favourite! A natty little knotty number!

After embroidering on the initial, I lighty quilted the panel with some scrap batting and a bit of muslin, just to give it a bit of extra body.  The back of the cushions are made with the offcuts of the backings of the quilts, to which I added a little fun label to make the boys smile when they turn their cushions over.  I'm still loving Harry's little snail:

And Max has got a frog that featured on one of his fabrics!

The backs are simple envelope style, therefore eliminating the drama of zips and I used left-over binding to join front and back together.

With hindsight, the letter would have stood out more had it been done in a plain fabric, but that would have meant buying something when the idea is to be a scrap-busting project!

The cushion pads are from John Lewis and measure 30 x 40 cm.

I'm brimming with ideas for cushions now...

...uh-oh!

Monkeys and magnets...

On Sunday I made my way over to Islington to the make lounge with Kristina to do some extraordinary embroidery.

It's been a long time since I really embroidered anything and one thing I have always struggled to do is a French knot.  Not anymore!  I think I could have quite happily sat and made them all afternoon!  Our lovely teacher, Catherine, showed us the crucial tip of holding the carefully wound thread close to the fabric as we pulled the needle through to produce perfect little knots.

We got to choose a Sublime Stitching transfer pack to embroider.  There was much ooh-ing and aah-ing at all the designs and minds were being constantly changed.  I settled on Monkey Love just because.

After ironing on our transfer, we set to embroidering our design.  I outlined his face in split stitch and filled in using the same stitch but in a lighter brown and then finished him off with two French knots for his eyes.

The carousel of threads in the window has inspired me to do lots more embroidery.  So I came straight home and got started on another design from the pack.

*****

Days 2 and 3 of the Seven Days of Specialness swaps have been filled with gasps of delight.  For Day 2 there was these fab fabrics...

...and for Day 3, these gorgeous fabric magnets.

A magnet board is on my list to put up in my workroom, so these will soon have a very important job in there.  Look how cute that little deer is!

Loving this week still!