Spiral scrappy slow stitching

On impulse, I decided to take a break from making embroidered felt birds - and stuffing myself with Easter chocolate - to start this bit of slow stitching. I've got the urge to make a circle bag. I've seen this kind of thing on YouTube, where a drawstring bag's made of a circle of material, and when the drawstring's loosened it opens out completely. So the fabric lays flat, meaning you can see exactly what the contents of your bag are and don't have to rummage around inside to pull out whatever you're wanting. Or, you can use the bag as a lunch bag, and when it's opened out that becomes a mini picnic blanket or place mat.

I also liked idea of using even the tiniest scraps of material, including delicate pieces of silk almost too fragile to use.

As well as little scraps that wanted using up, I also wanted to use lengths of embroidery thread that weren't wound around spools.

These are the leftovers from when I've divided up a six strand embroidery thread for other projects. They're all colours of the rainbow, and I decided to use them up in my slow stitching. I cut out a square of unbleached calico, and began by inserting it into an embroidery hoop. Then arranged fabric scraps from the centre outwards, in a kind of spiral. That led me to doing my slow stitching in a spiral too. Most of my fabric scraps have their raw edges turned under, but not all of them.

This is as far as I've got. I'm not entirely sure how I'm going to construct the circle bag. It'll need a lining, and of course I'll need to work out how the drawstring's going to be inserted. I quite fancy cutting out eyelets, embroidering around them to make a feature of them. Let's see how I get on, and hopefully I'll have something to show you in my next blog post.

Hope you're enjoying your day, and bye for now.

Comments

Threads of Freedom and charity shop bargains

It's Saturday afternoon, and I haven't done half the things I'd meant to. Partly because I spent most of this morning messing about with paints, stencils and the gell plate. Never mind, everything on today's 'To Do' list will join tomorrow's 'To Do' list ... it's hardly life or death if I don't haul the hoover around the room or pull up weeds in the front garden. I thought I'd show you what I made on Wednesday. I'd gone to my monthly StitchArt group, and this time we did something a little different. There's a project called 'Threads of Freedom' which is working with various community groups across the city. It's about creating little stitched pieces, some of which will be included in a textile panel to go on display at Leeds art gallery. There was lots of fabric we could choose from to sew with, and I picked this vintage tray cloth with the roses embroidery. My own embroidery's not a patch on those flo...

Another week's flown by ...

Saturday's rolled around again, and it's not been the most eventful of days. Cleaning and hoovering, a walk to the shops to buy groceries, an hour on the allotment, then home to do some odd tasks in the garden. The strawberry plants are sending out runners, so I've been dealing with those, plus deadheading the perennial sunflowers, and cutting back the gone-over flowers on the sage and marjoram. I'm sad to see those blooms gone as the bees loved them. This afternoon I spent a few hours finishing 'Dawnlands' by Philippa Gregory. It's a really good book, a page turner where you care about the characters and want to be reassured everything's going to work out well for them. Plus you become enraged about the corruption of the so-called justice system at the time of the Stuart kings and queens, about transportation of prisoners to the West Indies, and about the vile nature of the sugar trade in the 1600s and the vast profits made from it....

Folding a zine and an alternative use for a bank card

Hello again, and excuse me while I scratch my insect bites. I don't know what it is, but at this time of year I'm invariably itching like crazy because I've been bitten by bugs. It seems to coincide with blackberry-picking season, but whether that's purely coincidental I don't know. Whatever's biting me, I'm obviously a tasty morsel in their world! I might try using a highly scented oil like Tea Tree oil, see if that deters them. Anyway, let's get on to more pleasant matters - I'm having a go at making a zine style booklet. Because I didn't have any paper large enough, I joined together two A3 sheets of sketchpad paper, using torn pieces of book pages for the joining. I thought that'd look less noticeable than packing tape or similar. Having chosen my colour scheme I used acrylic paint and an unwanted plastic bank card to apply the paint. Plus a stencil, sponge and modelling paste. Applying paint with a ATM card wa...

rubykittyruby

Search This Blog