Panto and Christmas Flashbacks

As regular readers will know, I am heavily involved in a local amateur dramatics group (Scunthorpe Little Theatre Club) and this time of year is panto time. As with last year I ended up doing costume again – hence the reason I’ve only just surfaced. This year it was Mother Goose, with a new script which I wrote as well as being Costume Mistress and Dame’s dresser. Not the least of my jobs was making hats for the goslings and trying to work out where was best to place the nostrils!

But we’ve finished in theatre now – I just have every single costume (12 adults and 19 children, many with multiple costume changes) to wash and replace in our costume room.  It only took me until August last year…

But I did manage to design and stitch some Christmassy hoops for a workshop I taught before Christmas:

 

And a single snowflake which I stitched in silk:

The workshop, held at Jaylaurs, in Brigg was a great success. Just five ladies but they got on so well with the designs and two of them have since sent me lovely photos of their finished stitching.

I also had a go at chenille work, making a Christmas card for my parents. I started with a cardboard ring and used crewel work to stitch over it. Not satin stitch but coming up the same side and then going back over, to reduce the bulk at the back.

It was a long slow job…

…as it needed lots of layers to make sure I got the fluffy chenille effect at the end.

Now the fun bit – the cutting. Carefully in the middle. That meant I could get the card shape out but left me with a distinct space where it wouldn’t cover the base fabric.

Vintage trim to the rescue. I’ve had this particular very seventies trim since I was very young, when my mother would allow me a metre of ribbon or trim when she went to the local haberdashers, but not the sweets that like all small children I would have preferred! Anyway, sweets would not have solved my problem here but the trim that I’ve never used before did!

I stitched it down with little gold beads between the ‘flower’ sections and added a hand made gold bow at the bottom.

Very Christmassy and very pleased with it. (Was a nightmare to post though…!)

 

 

 

 

 

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Jewellery and Journals

Sorting some of my beachcombed treasures led to a couple of pieces of jewellery. First was a chunk of school ruler which had frosted beautifully in the waves. I paired it with a piece of beachcombed metal swarf with a lovely milled texture to make a brooch, now available here in my Etsy shop.

Then I managed to find two vintage panel bracelets which are great for setting with sea glass and pottery like this one. There is just something about blue and white sea-washed china that I love.

I also like to use panel bracelets to turn groupings of odd vintage earrings into unique assemblage bracelets. The theme that developed here was floral soft blues and greys with a central enamelled dragonfly. Available here in my Etsy shop.

I also managed to list the brooch I made during show week from a scrap of felted woollen jumper, a vintage kilt pin and an odd earring drop and it’s available here.

Definitely in my blue period!

I’ve also had a bit of a spurt with one of the pelmet vilene accordion book memory journals I’m working on. This one is based on a visit we made at the end of March to the North Sea Observatory and Anderby Creek beach in Lincolnshire. The shell strewn beach was unlike anything I’ve ever seen on the North Sea coast and then we had a stroll along the sand dunes to the lovely Anderby Beach Cafe for lunch before heading back home.

I stitched a fragment with cast on stitch and one of the big flat holed oyster shells in the summer but then things lapsed until a piece of evenweave gave me an idea to do a piece of pulled thread work. I used natural coloured silk thread and Diamond Stitch to create a random pattern like ripples in the sand.

Then I added some dried seaweed, a clam shell with a hole in and a little piece of driftwood.

I love the very clever Anderby Beach Cafe logo which uses part of the structure of a traditional deck chair as the initial ‘A’ and the hot dog I had for lunch that day, using local butcher’s sausages was delicious. So that quickly led to a hand painted and stitched applique ‘receipt’ on calico, featuring a splodge of ‘tomato sauce’ to remind me of how much I enjoyed my lunch!

Ideas forming for the North Sea Observatory and the Cloud Bar…!

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Show Stitching: The Third and Final Act

In the end, Baby Leaf-tailed Dragon wasn’t finished for show week and in total, I only managed to put half a dozen stitches in him on stage the entire week, most of which had to be unpicked and restitched later! But ‘The Fifth Elephant’ went well and we had lots of positive comments from Pratchett fans, some of whom had travelled some distance to come and see the show.  No rest for the am dram wicked though – last performance of ‘The Fifth Elephant’ on Saturday and tonight (Monday) is the first casting reading for panto!

I did manage to get some stitching done in the interval though, so all the Bayeux Stitch is completed and I’ve started the couched outline. It neatens the edge up a treat.

Since the Baby Leaf-tailed Dragon and his frame were props for a scene in Act 1, I had to find something else to sew before curtain up and I decided to experiment with a banner style brooch using an odd kilt pin. I had a few small pieces left of a wool jumper I felted a while ago and turned variously into a cushion cover, a pair of mittens and some earring cases.

I added some commercial grey marl felt and an odd earring drop…

…blanket stitch, french knots…

…sequins, a bead, split stitch and detached chain stitch…

…before finishing with a kantha stitched back ground in shimmery blending filament, a beaded blanket stitch edging which joined it to the grey felt back and blanket stitching it to the kilt pin in stranded silk thread.

A fun little project and I particularly like the subtle sparkle you get from the blending filament.

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Stumpwork Hedgerow Pinwheel

I bought this little kit well over ten years ago, when the Viking Loom was still in the shadow of York Minster! It used to live in my school bag, ostensibly so that I had something to stitch in quiet moments… Hence why it was still unfinished ten plus years later.

But with a few last stitches during the Easter break and the addition of the black seed bead blackberries, I finally completed it…

…and decided to add my monogram to the back using some of the leftover threads. First the A and the H in split stitch and the start of a trailing stem in back stitch.

Lazy daisy leaves.

And poppy red french knot flowers.

Finally the making up, which took ages until I finally found the pinwheel for the centre but somewhere in the last ten years I have misplaced some of the pins, so it’s a partial pinwheel, which is irritating.

Nice to have it finally finished!

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Old Stuff for New Beginnings

I’ve just started teaching a monthly embroidery class at Jaylaurs, a fabulous fabric and sewing shop in the nearby small market town of Brigg. I worked with three lovely ladies at the end of last month, all of whom enjoyed experimenting with some new stitches and I hope that they and some others will come along to the next one on the 30th of November. I created some more Stitch Play samples using more basic stitches, mainly based round running stitch, chain stitch and split stitch…

…but it was the more complex stitches like knotted buttonhole stitch, Pekingese Stitch and feather stitch that they wanted to try out!

Jayne, who runs Jaylaurs, asked me to create some purse flyers to give to people who expressed an interest in the classes and while looking for some suitable images and ideas I found some work I had done as examples of lessons I taught to Y5s and 6s a few years ago based on couching and whipped and threaded variants of running stitch.

They had been doing some batik and I wanted to get them to embellish some of their test pieces. This one is my sample piece with simple leaf shapes.

I had just bought a load of fancy threads for textile work and threaded and whipped running stitches were great ways of using threads that were far too thick and slubby to be used to stitch with themselves. The chenille thread on the left works particularly well.

The other sample was again to use the fancy threads, but this time couching them down in various patterns.

The thread with the fluffy ‘flags’ was very fine, so I remember couching it down backwards and forwards along the line to build up a thicker layer and seeing where the ‘flags’ fell as I worked along the thread. I hadn’t planned it, but they seemed to always end up together in clumps!

And then I found this: an early bit of found object work, using various bits and pieces that I had picked up around school. It includes an odd stud earring (flanked by two short screws) that was never claimed after PE and finally found its way into the school piano and a broken trouser fastener (centre) kindly donated for use in the piece by the lad in my class at the time. His trousers had suffered a catastrophic fail as a result of an overenthusiastic tackle in football at break and he spent the rest of the day in his PE shorts. The fastener was recovered from the playground following the incident.

A bit of fun and some good memories of some of the amazing children I have taught over the years.

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Little Bits.

The little free cross stitch of the rhododendrons at Stagshaw Gardens from our Lake District holiday in May is completed, as is the journal itself, something of a super-quick finish given that I’ve only just completed my journal for our last family holiday in Dorset last July!

The bluework has crawled on from this:

To this:

Not much change, apart from the beginning of some umbellifer-type flowers in split stitch, free cross stitch and french knots near the foot of the bowl.

And as I went down to London at the end of last week to see my foster daughter get her PhD at the Barbican, I needed something small and easy to transport and work on. The result was some not blackwork.

I had some oddments of blue Aida and decided that gold on blue would be nice. The patterns were freebies from the internet which I stitched as a repeat rather than single motifs. Sometimes it’s nice just to do little odds and ends.

 

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Blue Ribbon Rose brooch

I’ve been restocking and updating my Etsy shop with that December thing coming up fast on the horizon and although a lot of my pieces have involved sea glass, sea washed china and found objects, I did get inspired by another vintage brooch without a central stone.

So I gathered some supplies and started to stitch a ribbon rose on some scraps of hand dyed silk.

With a woven rose in the middle, split stitch curling stems either side and some french knot buds, it stitched up quite quickly.

Then I layered three pieces of pelmet vilene, each slightly smaller than the other to create a domed shape, gathered the silk around the dome and pulled it up tight. A piece of the rust coloured background silk covered the gathering at the back and then I set it in the brooch.

You can find it here.

I also created this flotsam assemblage pendant…

 

…from a piece of wave worn aluminium…

…which I beachcombed ages ago and just love; a piece of tactile driftwood and a long nugget of sea glass which sat in the groove of that grain perfectly.

A treasured oval piece of multicoloured Seaham sea glass went into a vintage pendant.

And rich green oval nugget of sea glass went into another vintage pendant.

In fact I managed to find and nearly match so many lovely green pieces that I was able to add a pair of upcycled vintage clip on earrings…

..and a bracelet.

It’s lovely to be able to reuse some of these gorgeous pieces and bring broken jewellery back to life again.

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