— Seema Brain Openers
In crafting there are no mistakes just unique creations.
— Anonymous
Crafts make us feel rooted, give us a sense of belonging and connect us with our history. Our ancestors used to create these crafts out of necessity, and now we do them for fun, to make money and to express ourselves.
— Phyllis George
Well . . . it’s been a while, hasn’t it?
To be honest, there hasn’t been all that much exciting going on. A lot of reading and a lot of stitchery.
Tuesday my stitchery guild had its first in-person meeting in two years. And seeing as it was a “stitch and show” meeting, where we show off some of our work, I figured I’d better finish up a couple of things so I had something to show. I started off with my challenge piece:
Early in the year one of the ladies from the group came around with a little gift back that had a pattern and some aida cloth in it. We were challenged to use our own coloured thread and embellish it any way we wanted.
I started out using three strands of thread but it worked much better with two. And the little triangles around the border just about killed my eyes at first, but then I got into the rhythm and it wasn’t so bad. I admit I don’t do a lot of cross stitch because I do find it hard on the eyes.
You can’t really see them well, but I sewed a crystal bead in the center of the little pink flowers. The dragonflies came from the dollar store – a great place for craft supplies. When it was done I thought it looked rather plain and I thought framing it in lace was a great idea. Unfortunately, the first lace I used was too stretchy and looked horrible. It took me forever to get it on there, and almost as long to get it off again. The lace in the picture came from Fabricland and it was just a happy coincidence that it worked.
This next piece was something I actually did several years ago:
I did it for our downstairs bathroom and just need to frame it.
Then I pulled out some strips I’d done for fun and always intended to turn into bookmarks:
All they needed was a good press with the iron and a backing put on them.
Not shown is the name tag I came up with. I used black aida cloth and red thread. It’s a simple thing, just my name, but it looked so plain that I dressed it up a bit with red glass beads around the edge.
Getting together with my sewing friends, finishing a couple of projects and digging out my stitchery stuff rekindled my love of needlework. But it also rekindled my love of needlework supplies.
So last Monday I went to Michael’s Craft store. It’s amazing how quickly things add up at the craft store. The biggest purchase was embroidery floss. Once upon a time I had the embroidery floss I’d collected over the course of more than 20 years, all wound neatly on cards and stored in a plastic box. I wrote the colour numbers on the cards, and everything was in numerical and colour-coordinated order.
Somehow I have lost the box. I’ve searched everywhere I can think of – gone through the craft closet several times – but there’s no trace of it. It’s going to take hundreds of dollars, and probably years, to replace all that thread. Some of it can’t be replaced. But I’ve made a good start, and I’ll just add to the new collection project by project.
The one thing Michael’s did not have were embroidery transfers (the pictures on paper that you can just iron onto your material to embroider). I’m doing a baby quilt with pictures I traced out of a colouring book, but it’s not really an ideal way to do things. Neither is using carbon paper or the similar paper used for transferring dressmaking marks.
So when I got home I went online and ordered several embroidery transfer sets from Amazon, as well as a set of pencils that you can trace a picture with and then iron it onto your fabric. In essence, you’re making your own transfer.
You’d think I’d be all set to dive into my stitchery now, but I really need to finish the afghan I started. I’ve only got about a third of it to go, so hopefully I can finish it this week.
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