A Prickly Stitch

This week’s TAST stitch was barred and alternating barred chain. 
It was a prickly stitch in more ways than one.  It really does have a mind of it’s own.  When I first saw it I thought whatever I was going to interpret for this stitch it had to be something spiky or prickly.  A few things ran through my mind – cactus, barbed wire, birds nest, rose branches and crown of thorns. After a search on Flickr (gotta love flickr) I decided to go with cactus.

The cacti are done in all types of thread, mostly 2 strands of DMC and Shirley gave me the blue wool which was perfect for the border.  Thank you Shirley, you are so wise with these types of things.
The colouring on the background is done with Prismacolor pencils and heat set. (I hope).
You can see more samples on Sharon B’s pintangle site.  Also have a look at the photos on Stitchin’ Fingers – there is so much inspiration on that site and you can join up and look further too.  Check out work by Luiz Vaz he is a real master of embroidery!!!

I’m in love……

With my new Pfaff Quilt Expression 4.0  sewing machine!!!! 

It is a dream to sew with and even free motion stitching  is a breeze.

I made this thread and snippet fabric by free motioning over the threads and snippets sandwiched between two layers of solvy.  We did this project at TQ Art Quilters on Saturday.  it was a lot of fun.  I must say, it is quite sparkly in real life as I added a few snippets of angelina.

During the week I also whipped up 6 bright kaffe fasset coasters.  I love KF xxx

Lily loves my sewing room.  She especially had fun in her scrap ‘boat’.

The Wheels Turned Slowly

 

This week for TAST  was woven wheels.  It was a slow start for me with a lot of reverse stitching.  My wheels just didn’t like what I was making them out of and also didn’t want to be very round!!  After quite a few attempts I started getting the hang of them and started to really enjoy doing them.

This is what I ended up with – “Treasures Beneath”.  It is quite ‘blingy’ in real life but it doesn’t show up in the photograph.

The background is coloured with fabric paint very lightly.  It doesn’t show well in the photo either.  I wish I knew how to photograph my pieces properly!!!!

The border is just a narrow row of bars which have been woven (perle thread).

This week I didn’t do a journal for the stitch but will instead glue in some pictures and copies of wheels I have seen.

This was my journal for last week’s piece ‘Naxos’.

There are some other ideas for running stitch I would like to explore here.

Make sure you don’t miss all the other fabulous samples of woven wheels on Sharon B’s Pintangle site.

Naxos

As soon as I saw this work by Vicki Lugg in one of Shirley’s books I knew I had to do my running stitch based on this piece.

On the left is the original early work originating in Naxos, Greece.  On the right is Vicki’s contemporary interpretation.

This is my little piece using elements taken from the original and Vicki’s work.
There are many things I would do differently now but this piece was quickly prepared to take away to the beach house to work on.  Nevertheless I enjoyed working on it.
The running stitch is such a simple one but also a very versatile one which is evident by what people produced in the TAST challenge this past week.  You can catch up with all the running stitch samples HERE and also on Stitichin Fingers
Looking forward to the challenge for this week now!!

Couching Around

 Many ideas got bandied around in my sketch book until I arrived at the ‘Forest’ idea.

I still like some of these ideas here so may do another couching sample down the track one day.
It was enjoyable to do but the forest became a bit tedious stopping and starting with different length yarns etc.
FOREST

I scrounged the white dupioni silk from Shirley and used pieces of organza to build up the background.
Yarns used were all different types and I used a hairy golden brown one for the forest floor.
The border was a rayon type of braid which was a bit hard to handle but I just carefully couched it on best I could.
Take a Stitch Tuesday is weekly challenge put out by Sharon Boggon of www.pintangle.com and you can see lots of other examples of couching HERE.