Tag Archives: stitchalong

The Great Sparkly-Ass Thread Debacle of 2011

  By Allison | September 11, 2011 - 3:46 pm | Fortitude 4 Comments

So I’ve picked myself up, dusted myself off… and after my spooktacular failure at getting an early start on Feeling Stitchy’s September Stitch-A-Long, I’ve had to start again. (Halloween theme… spooktacular...see what I did there?)  Originally I wanted to stitch the design onto black cloth, but after the fail with aida, I ordered some black cotton online, ….and the sellers let me down and didn’t ship it out yet.  Clearly I’m doomed to failure.  But heck, I’m chomping at the bit so I decided to use a pillow case that I already had on hand and just get going.  This will also help to reduce some of the growing mountain of embroidery supplies that I am amassing.

I’m using a pale yellow linen pillowcase.  I know.  Not a very Halloween-y colour, right?  Yeah, well – tough.  I figured the ghostly white and bright orange colours would at least show up (as opposed to on a while background) and well… you know, sometimes you just have to be a solider and get on with the tools that you have.

So I retraced the lovely design (by Cathy Gaubert) onto my pillowcase using red tracing paper.  Nice huh?  That purple mark, by the way, is the centre of the case – I used one of those disappearing “trick markers” to do it.  Do they really disappear after 24 hours?  I’m wondering. (more…)

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Fabrics

  By Allison | August 14, 2011 - 11:29 am | Hope Leave a comment

Well, if threads are a gateway drug, I’m already graduating to new addictions.  Fabrics!  In my sponge-like quest to absorb everything I can about embroidery, I have been seeking out bloggers who are writing about it.  I found a wonderful Flickr group and a blog called Feeling Stitchy which brings together some really talented stitchers and provides a platform for a great community of people to sbow off their work.  One thing they do which is really fun is a monthly Stitchalong, where everyone works on the same pattern or project at the same time.  Such a fun a idea.  This month they are doing a project where everyone picks a patterned fabric to embellish with stitches.  I am totally up for this – a great project for someone who is just getting started in embroidery, like me!

I tried trusty old eBay, figuring I’d find some cool vintage fabric remnants there.  I soon got weary of trolling through pages and pages or ugly fabrics, and the prices weren’t cheap either!   So I found a great online fabric store, Fabric Inspirations, who sell tons of cool retro style and new prints.   I chose these two – a bright birds/flowers pattern, and a zoo animals pattern.   Although I like the colours on the top fabric better, I think I might go with the bottom fabric as it seems that lots of people have chosen bird-based patterns for the stitchalong.

I’m going to take a few days to decide.

 

 

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