Taking liberties….

Sew I decided to take part in another couple of sewing swaps – both are Christmas swaps run by Tracy of Madaboutbags . The first is an advent swap and for this I need to make or buy 24 little gifts to be opened each day of December. The second is a Santa’s sack swap for which I have to make a bag or stocking filled with 5 hand made or bought gifts. So this weekend I decided to make a start on a small sack – but my partner is not keen on Christmas fabrics and so I chose to use up some liberty scraps. I made up the design based on a picture she had posted as I could not find a pattern.

First I cut out 8 strips of Liberty scraps into 6.5″ x 2″ strips, these were then sewn together. I then made a little strap from linen and liberty. The strap and scraps were then sandwiched between two strips of linen, both 6″x 12″. This was to be the front of the bag. I repeated the process (minus the strap) for the back of the bag.

From the same fabrics I also made two casings to go around the top of the bag and thread the drawstring through.  One of the casing was laid on top of one of the bag panels and then a lining material placed over the both. All three parts were then sewn along the top edge and pressed open. As you can see from the photo below, I repeated the process for the back of the bag.

The two panels were then put right sides together and the edges sewn around – leaving a small opening, corners were boxed and the whole thing was turned the right way out. Here is the end result….

I hope she likes it………………now for the rest of the gifts!!!

Happy stitching everyone!

 

 

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Silk Shading Happy Dance!

Going in to the final day my silk shading piece looked like this…. just a cm or two to complete.

By lunch time I had put in the final stitches and the piece was checked for missing stitches before it could finally be removed from the frame. The last afternoon of the intensive course was spent pinning my piece of work to the boards I had prepared earlier on in the week. More pins are added as the work is gradually stretched to remove any puckering in the fabric. I did manage to ladder stitch all four corners and then went around the whole piece in herringbone stitch.

All that is left to do is to add the sateen to the back of the piece to neaten everything off. Yay!

I have really enjoyed the intensive course – the class had only 7 students in total with a tutor, Deb Wilding, and future tutor, Jung Byun, to help out. It was a very relaxed atmosphere with lots of help and support on hand. I might have just been lucky with the mix of students and the tutors that we had – but on my experience this week, I would thoroughly recommend it to others.

Happy stitching one and all.

Silk shading day 7/8

Another day at home and I managed to finish off the leaf and add the lime/yellow highlights to the flower spathe.

I have been looking forward to adding more colour to this piece – but think after 10 days of non-stop sewing, I have finally hit a brick wall and the mixture of colours within the flower have totally deluded me today. Here is what I managed to complete – but I am still not happy about the combination of threads.

I am hoping to finish tomorrow as it is mounting day – not sure I will be able to complete all the mounting, but I am quite pleased to have got so much completed.

Happy stitching everyone.

World embroidery day – silk shading

I just love that World embroidery day is on my birthday! I thought it was just a one off date to start off with, but now make sure that I spend time sewing every time it comes around! Today I spent a ‘working from home’ day sewing my silk shading piece. I need to get the leaf finished as well as the top edge of the flower spathe before I go back into the RSN on Thursday.  If I manage to do that then I will stand a good chance of being able to mount up on the Friday!

Here is where I got to today…

Happy stitching everyone!

A touch of colour – silk shading day 5

I think that all the sewing has caught up with me a little today – I certainly wasn’t as productive as I had hoped I would be. I added a little more colour to the top of the flower spathe – but that was it really. It is nice to see a little bit of colour – but the areas were small and tricky to sew – especially as the stitch direction also alters.

The sewing room.

Not much happening here!

The next two days are spent working at home and I hope to complete the leaf and a little more of the flower. Two consecutive days working from home is a little worrying as I am new to this technique – so if anything goes wrong on day 1, I will have a whole day to wait before speaking to my tutor. Fingers crossed. xxx

Happy sewing everyone.

 

Silk Shading day 4…

So a module with the RSN wouldn’t be the same without a little (or a lot) of reverse stitching and today was the day! I started off well and managed to get almost half a leaf completed but greens were beginning to look the same so my tutor Deb Wilding decided it would be a good idea to start on the flower

We had already chosen colours that might be suitable – but something that I have learnt over the last few days is that when you take several threads of different colours they don’t always behave as you expect. Certain colours when mixed give a very dirty appearance and the reddy pinks that I had chosen looked more brown when put together. So after two hours work my flower looked like this….

Colour not quite right

Two hours  later it looked like this…..

All change

During the day we also prepared two pieces of mounting board that were cut with a 3cm allowance around each edge of the work. The boards were then stuck together and edges sanded to ensure they were even. Once the glue was dry we covered them with calico  – just incase we managed to finish by Friday next week.

Day 5 was a ‘working from home’ day for which we were all given homework to complete. I was set the task of finishing the area of the flower that I had started, finish off the bottom half of the leaf and then backstitch the rest of the leaf.

Here is the finished area of flower – still not sure that the shading is correct – first half of the leaf completed and the other half of the leaf after completing the backstitching around the edges.

 

Flower part finished!

Backstiching around the leaf.

I then started on filling in the darker areas of the leaf below the turnover. Just hope that I don’t have to do too much reverse stitching!

Stitch happy one and all.

 

In the green – Silk shading day 3

I spent the whole day today focussing on filling in half of the large (very large) leaf. First I outlined part of the leaf in slip stitch, keeping it just on the painted design edge. Then you begin long and short starting your stitch inside the leaf and plunging behind the split stitches.

There are no other stitches to learn – you simple continue going row on row following on from your initial long and short stitches. The only difference is that after the first row the new stitches are always brought up in the previous stitches and the needle plunged into clean fabric.. Progress is very slow and by the end of the day every green thread on my canvas looked exactly the same! After a days stitching this is where my piece is at…

Apparently tomorrow I can work on the other half of the leaf – yay, more green! I have to admit I am a little jealous of some of the other students pieces of work – particularly those with lots of vibrant colour!

Happy stitching everyone.