Tuesday Stitchers import: a little bit of everything

Hi, friends!
I apologize for missing my posting times last weekend and the weekend before-- I was traveling. I thought that I would be able to get internet access at some point during that time, but it didn't turn out that way.

Back home now, back to my own keyboard! Yay!

 I also thought that I would get a lot of stitching time while I was traveling. It didn't work out that way either! Ack.

 My mind has been on other things. My bunny, dear companion for the past six years, got diagnosed with bone cancer. Trying to coordinate his treatment plan with my vet (who was boarding him for me, thank goodness!) while I was traveling was an interesting experience. So now we're hoping for the best, monitoring his day-to-day status, and preparing for the eventual (but hopefully later, not sooner).

Enough of that! My grandmother is doing well, at least! :) So here's what I managed in my stitching:

I finished the bullion bumblebee on Shelly's RR block. 

I gave him irridescent tatted wings. :) They turned out really great! A lot of metallic and shimmer threads are very difficult to tat with because either they are too thin and/or fragile, or because they are shimmer wrapped around a core and the loop-closing process shreds the threads. This irridescent was, I believe, one of the Kreinik braided threads sold for embroidery. It works suprisingly well!

And I sent the block off in the mail for the next stitcher to work on. Also received the next RR block to start working on. :)

I had three birthday swap projects to finish up and mail while traveling:

a postcard for Melody

I forgot to take my own picture before putting it into the mail. Fortunately, Melody took this delightful picture, so I have something for my records and to share! I actually thought that I had forgotten to write the address on the back of the postcard, so I am absolutely delighted that it even got where it was supposed to!

an Artist Trading Card (ATC) for Judy

There's a little bit of everything in this one-- crossed chain, u&d buttonhole, herringbone, some tatting, whipped wheel on pistil stitch spokes, and finally some cast-on stitches! Several of the fabricss I used for this one came from my grandmother's scrap-and-quilt stash. Let's just say that my grandmother and I have very different color sensibilities! She seems to have loved yellowish browns, acid greens, oranges, and all of those colors put together. The 1970s were kind to her, I think!

It was a bit of a challenge working in this colorway for me, and I'm not sure how I feel about the red and blue as accents against the orange and green. hmm.

This one was especially interesting to stitch on this week because I did the finishing work (backing and binding) before I traveled, and before I did most of the stitching. Fortunately, I'm a fan of the scoop method, so it worked out pretty well for me.

ATC for Marja

The background fabric is a handwoven leftover from a university project back in 2003. Since my collection of threads was pared down for travel, I opted for a simple triad of red, yellow, and blue for the colorway, and relied upon the stitches for textural interest. There is a rose made of cast-on stitches, a tatted flower made with a modified tatting technique that I worked out while travelling, a crocheted daisy tacked on with a star center, and a whole bunch of French knots. 

This one and the postcard were still raw-edged, so I had to pick up some background fabric on the go, and do the finishing work by hand.

I guess that's where September went! When I get a chance to look at the pictures as I'm typing about them, I realize that I did a lot more stitching than I give myself credit for. Especially when you consider the handwork that doesn't really show (like stitching the border around the pc and the atc by hand).

I did get a wee bit done on my peacock CQJP, but am still very far behind, and unlikely to get much finished in the next two days.

I played a bit with a couple of knotted Basque stitch variations. They were more interesting to do than to look at, I think.

I did some more tatting and added it to the block. Tatting turns out to be a pretty easy thing to do on an airplane. It's small and it doesn't take large arm movements (that might annoy the stranger sharing the armrest), so that's what I did instead of stitching during the flight.

I created this unique little combo-stitch that I like quite a lot! It's a fern stitch of four legs spaced very close together, anchored by a pistil stitch. I think it looks like little chicken footprints. A very odd, alien chicken, maybe. I think it would be very nice with a bugle bead or a seed-bead combo on the long float of the pistil stitch. :) Must try that out now that I am back home with access to my beads again!

and my crowning glory seam treatment for this week:

..
Now THIS is more like my colorway! Heh. The picture washes it out a bit and doesn't show the sparkle of the metallic, but I think you get the idea. This color combo could probably serve as emergency lighting in a power outage. ;)
I started with a base of fern stitch in metallic purple. Then I remembered that I still wanted to do a decent exploration of cast-on stitch. I added a row of fuschia cast-ons, and then came back and added a row of smaller orange cast-ons to overlap them. So cool! I really liked how that turned out. As if that wasn't bright enough already, I added the bright yellow pistil stitch accents.
I love it.
I really really love it.
It makes my heart sing. :)

Well, that's what happened to September.

Tuesday Stitchers import: CQJP August

Well, I found the variegated blue-and-purple thread that I used for my buttonhole loops, but not before I gave up looking for it and used a different thread! Ah well, isn't that the way life works? What do you think? does the yellow-and-orange make a good finish to the line? Heh! I'm okay with it, anyway.


I added a nice little blanket-stitch serpentine. I'm thinking of adding French knot or seed bead accents to the line when I have some more time. :)


Another tatted tidbit, this time worked in a braided metallic (gold) and a variegated green perle. The metallic doesn't show real well in the photo. It's pretty glitzy in real life.


And then I started experimenting with the TAST Double Linked Chain stitch. :) I wasn't impressed with this stitch from the look of it on the challenge post, and I wasn't particularly impressed with it when I worked it according to the instructions:

It's okay.. it just doesn't have the punch that I'd like. Maybe it would be better worked in a different thread, or with different proportions.
But it got me thinking about what I'd LIKE for it to look like. Then I played around with varying the construction method, and got these three results, all of which I particularly like! So the DLC itself isn't likely to be one of my go-to stitches, but these three variations I came up with sure are!

One last seam treatment, a stitch combo including chain, straight, and French knot stitches:

So that leaves me with an August wedge looking like:

I'm hoping to get some more stitching done on the purple stripes before the end of the month, but I still have a BJP mandala to stitch up too! ACK!! where does the time go?

Tuesday Stitchers import: CQJP progress end of July and early August

I am so glad that I got so much done in early July because I didn't get a lot of extra stitching time before the month ended.

I did get a chance to try Basque stitch, and enjoyed it:

I added a fly-stitch + bullion variant:

I must have done this bullion rose and herringbone combo because I don't see it mentioned in a previous post:

My very favorite, though is this lovely little chain-stitch serpentine line with French knot accents. The chainstitching is done with a lovely little DMC floss that I dyed myself! :) SO happy with the way that color set came out:

It's even prettier in real life. :)

I also managed to finish up my June bjp (which only got half-finished in June) and my Junly bjp. :) Yay!! ... except that I still need to turn under the excess fabric to finish up the medallions.

June

July

Okay... apparently I got more accomplished than I gave myself credit for. That seems to be a running theme in my head--what is it that I'm expecting from myself that I always feel like I 'haven't accomplished much'? I think I need a minor mental adjustment. :P

Plus, I managed to get a nicer picture of one the seams I showed previously. It's a multi-strand orange herringbone laced with purple:

As for the posting schedule, I have one more big dance weekend coming up this coming weekend, so I know I'm going to miss my Sunday timeslot. I'll get my post up as soon afterward as I can manage! :)

So now I have three TAST stitches to catch up on: oyster, Algerian eye, and cast-on. I should be able to incorporate oyster and cast-on without much problem, but I anticipate some problems incorporating Algerian eye. Most of the fabrics I used on this project are a bit fine and tightly woven, plus I interfaced a lot of them, so pulling open the eye of AE will be a little tricky to say the least! And the support fabric beneath the decorative fabrics is not one that I would want to have show through. ack. I'll figure something out. :)

Tuesday Stitchers import: CQJP July progress

Halfway through July, and for once I'm making decent progress!

After a rough start with bonnet stitch on June's patch, I got the hang of the stitch and started to really like it. I discovered that the over vs under are equally easy to do, depending upon which direction I lay my thread trail as I create the stitch. Once I got the hang of it, it went smoothly and quickly.

I particularly like the braided look that I got by letting the bonnet stitch legs touch. (purple stitches in upper picture, orange stitches in lower picture).

I also really enjoyed up and down buttonhole stitch, which I am sure will be a go-to stitch for me!

For some reason I decided that I needed to couch threads for the palm fronds on one piece of fabric, and use herringbone and satin for the flower motif on another piece of fabric even though both were only partial motifs! The herringbone was particularly time consuming, but I enjoyed doing it.

I worked a zigzag line of bullion stitches (I'm not convinced the end result was worth the effort)...

a line of nice familiar knotted buttonhole...

and a row of scalloped blanket. This stitch is worked at first just like blanket stitch (aka plain buttonhole), but before making the next blanket stitch, you work a series of little half-hitches around the post of the previous blanket stitch.

So maybe this month I'll be able to catch up again!

Tuesday Stitchers import: CQJP June and six-month reveal

I'm back! I was offline for awhile because my beloved laptop got a huge crack in the screen. (I forgot to take a picture before my husband took it apart for me to replace the screen.) I thought I was only going to be computerless for a week or so, but the replacement screen that got sent was the wrong one and we had to wait for a replacement for the replacement before my husband could get my laptop up and running again. Fortunately, he's good at that kind of thing, and I'm back in business! Yay!

So I missed the last part of June and the June reveal and the six-month block combo reveal, so here's my catch-up for that! It's been so long I've forgotten which stitches are which, so please forgive me if I mis-label some of them!

The little row of "fish" like stitches on the top is some sort of experimentation with a detached cable chain stitch (I think), but now I can't remember how I even did it! It was just some sort of different way of wrapping the thread as I made the stitch, and then catching the loop with a couching stitch (like for fly stitch and bonnet) before it pulls snug... but I'd need a magnifying glass and a contortionist's handbook to figure it out again, I suspect!

The bottom row (pale lilac silk on pale lavender background -- the photo washes it out almost completely) is either knotted cretan (TAST wk 22) or palestrina (TAST wk 26)-- I'm not sure I know how to tell the difference from the look of the stitch once it's completed.

The diagonal line on the left is another line of knotted cretan (or palestrina, maybe). It's actually two lines of knotted cretan (or whatever) interlacing each other: one of lavender and one of orange. The camera apparently doesn't like that combo and washed it out completely. I'm going to have to try to take some of these pictures again and see if I can't get better results. argh.

The diagonal on the right is my first attempt at bonnet stitch (TAST wk 27). From this first attempt, I was pretty sure I was going to despise the stitch because it felt cumbersome, like each stitch took forever: make a straight stitch, then figure out how to get the needle under the stitch without catching the ground fabric or splitting the thread, then adjust the tension, then down and up again and catch the loop... ew.

Then came TAST wk 24 and buttonhole fan stitch. Really? Isn't buttonhole fan stitch just buttonhole stitch in a different shape? Does that really count as a different stitch entirely? Well, I guess it does. :) ... or maybe there aren't really any different stitches at all, and knotted cretan is palestrina is just a variation on feather or fly or whatever. I'm SO confused at this point!!

But buttonhole fan was the assigned stitch of the week, so I found a way to experiment with it. The scalloped line of buttonhole fan at the top of the pic is nice, but nothing out of the ordinary, but my little "spiderweb" pattern below it I'm particularly proud of! I used a variegated grey thread (not sure I'm exactly pleased with where the color breaks ended up, but oh well) and played around with stacking buttonhole fan in rows on top of each other, and alternating the leg lengths as I did. The result seems sort of lace-like, or maybe reminiscent of a cobblestone street. Mmm. Happiness.

At that point, I was in Leavenworth (and the bonnet stitch mentioned above had not yet happened-- pictures don't capture the sequencing very well) for a dance performance, and I had no access to any stitch directories or online inspiration or CQ books to look at. I had to pull from my own imagination and my own personal set of go-to stitches.

I started with the bullion rose (or peony?) and rose buds (or whatever buds), added some chainstitch stems (three strands DMC floss of three different colors) which looked a little cumbersome and stiff all on their own, so I added straight-stitch grass around the base (single strand DMC of each of the colors I used in the flower stem).

I remembered that buttonhole fan could also be used to make a buttonhole butterfly, so I had to try and see if I could remember how to do one from memory. Not too bad! He looks somewhat butterfly-like. He has a bullion stitch body, a little bullion stitch (in a circle, couched down) head, and pistil stitch antennae. Then I figured I needed some sign of movement: a relationship between the butterfly and the flower, so I did a little running-stitch loop-de-loop. That was allright, but it seemed really weird the way he was loop-de-looping all nice and playful like but then all of a sudden the last bit of his path is a straight bee-line (are bee lines all that straight, actually?) up and away...hmm... so he must have been spooked into avoiding something, right? So that's when I stitched up the little frog. Does it look like a frog? I really can't tell! It's either cute or really scary, and I don't know which! It's not exactly the frog I was trying to stitch, and now I don't have the perspective to look at it with unbiased eyes.

Somewhere in all that stitching I put ladybugs into the grass, added a line of brown blanket stitch below the grass (dirt? roots, maybe?) and ran a line of cable chain (TAST wk 25) up the diagonal. I think I used a crochet thread for the cable chain, and I really like how it turned out.

The little grey row of blanket stitch triangles was stitched much earlier, so I think I talked about that one already.

I revisited the metallic stars that I had stitched a while back and decided that I liked them better pulled closed at the center instead of open like they had been. I also decided that the cloud pattern printed on the cloth (very faded after having been worn as a pair of slacks and then jammies for several years) needed to be enhanced with tiny little stitches. I did most of the clouds with back stitch (which worked very well), but on one cloud (the center bottom one) I used running stitch which turned out a little differently and which effect I didn't like quite as much, but didn't dislike enough to pull it back out again.

Under the clouds is a line of Magic Chain --the red and green loops at the left edge that transition into yellow and orange at the right edge (I used a variegated crochet thread), and then I took the remaining length of yellow and orange and laced it back through the row in the other direction. It didn't do quite what I thought it would do, so I ended up adding some couching threads to hold it in an interesting shape. Ah well. Experimentation does not always yield the results one was hoping for.

Then came TAST wk 28 with up and down buttonhole stitch. I rather liked this stitch, and I can see it ending up in my set of go-to stitches.

So that wraps up June!

and six months of CQJP progress!!

Well, that was a lot to write, and I imagine it's a lot to digest, too! So I'll wait to talk about my progress so far in July until Monday. :)

Tuesday Stitchers import: May reveal and June progress

Well, it took longer than I'd planned to find my camera, get fresh batteries into it, take the pictures, find the cable to connect my camera to my computer, edit the pictures to a decent size and cropping, and get them ready to post. Ain't that the way of things! It's not just the stitching that takes all the time.

As previously mentioned, life has been treating me like a ping-pong ball of late, and I'm trying to just smile and go with the flow. I'm a little behind on things across the board, but I still find a couple of minutes every now and then to make a stitch or two, and they do eventually add up!

Here's what I managed to get done for May:

I didn't manage to get an embroidered applique done yet for May or for April, but I do know what will go onto each one, assuming I find time to get the sketches and the stitching done.

I added a butterfly chain, with the chain done in a variegated sewing thread.

and I played around with the V-formation ideas as I was working.

Then May was over, and it was time to  start on June! Ack!! Where does the time go?

I added another butterfly chain on June's block, with seed bead accents this time.

Chain stitch is becoming a go-to stitch, and I'm liking the way the variegated thread worked.

Blanket and buttonhole have always been go-to stitches for me. I'm particularly enjoying playing with spacing and leg lengths.

I'm also really liking variegated threads lately.

Chain stitch on the left.

Feather (or is it Fern?) on the top, worked in a variegated metallic thread and varying leg lengths.

The star fabric was pretty faded (I reclaimed the fabric from a much-loved and worn-through garment), so I traced over the stars with metallic running stitches, and have started tracing over the cloud patterns with little white rayon running stitches.

The bottom is a magic chain worked in doubled-over space-dyed crochet cotton with the (now yellow and orange) ends woven back through the chain and couched into place. It's not my favorite line, but I'm leaving it alone anyway.

This is double chain (chain worked back two links instead of one) worked over a satin ribbon for spacing control. Originally I'd planned to slide the ribbon out after the line was finished, but I caught the ribbon too many times with my needle and it wouldn't budge, so now it's staying. I kinda like the result anyway. :)

and this is my least favorite seam so far. It might come out because it isn't getting better with more layering and it might be puckering my fabric. Ah well. It's a chain stitch with the chains held open by fly stitches and then the open spaces filled up with French knots.

I'm finding that  strongly dislike working on this project with the thicker threads. They feel cumbersome, and they distort the fabric base more than I want to tolerate. I think they'd be okay couched down, but stitching them through the cloth is just proving to be one frustration after another.

So it's back to thin threads and detail work for me!

Well, now I'm off to my weekly CQ meetup, without which I might not get any sewing at all accomplished! 

I won't be able to post this weekend, as I'll be busy with dance performance again, so I will aim to get my next post up by Monday evening, or Tuesday afternoon.

Tuesday Stitchers import: CQJP progress

It's been a very slow week. I got three seams done. That's all, just three seams. They're good seams, but that leaves me with a lot of work to do still before the end of the month! Ah well. Celebrate what IS, right?

I added needle-woven picot leaves to my line of bullion roses, and then surrounded them with an abundance of French knots in a variegated perle thread. I added a line of tatting, and I added a row of crenellations in green DMC floss using a single strand each of three colors of green. I worked the row over a scrap of aida cloth which I then removed afterward by pulling the aida out one thread at a time. It worked great in some ways: it was quick and easy and kept my stitches very uniform, and the aida was easy enough to unravel when I was ready to remove it. But it also caused my row of stitches to be looser than I like (because of the thickness of the aida), so after I removed the Aida I had to readjust the tension of the row. Since it was just straight stitches that wasn't too hard to do except for the two places that I split the threads and couldn't draw the excess past that point, so at those points I just hid the excess on the back and couched the loop to keep it from escaping back to the front again. Also, I somehow managed to get a gap in one of the stitches despite the use of the Aida! argh. Oh well. Stuff like that happens.

This coming week I might accomplish even less-- there is a huge dance workshop weekend coming up, so I will have no time at all to stitch after Wednesday. That leaves me a total of 5 stitching days remaining this month, and a whole lot of stitching to accomplish. If it weren't for the supportive community of fellow stitchers here on the blog and in real life, I might have already gotten distracted from this project! So thank you for helping me stay focused. :)