Showing off

My designs, that is.
A friend embroidered them for me. If you are a regular visitor, you know that 6 of my doodles  have been digitized into embroidery designs and are currently built into 2 Janome sewing machines. I blogged about that excitement several times already....you can find those posts here.

Each design was stitched in gleaming white thread on black cotton, I pieced them into a simple wall hanging so that I can now proudly display them

I had great fun quilting the background.

 

Embellished Wool Applique

Do you recall this little quilt?

At the time that I showed it, I don't think I explained that it was a sample for a workshop I was asked to conduct. I don't generally accept invitations to lecture or teach but this was for my former guild, so I just could not turn them down.

The workshop was held on Saturday, it was well attended and well received. The ladies arrived prepared and ready to enjoy the day. They brought their supplies, were eager to jump right in. I really did not have to do all that much...I demonstrated a few stitches, gave suggestions for the variety of ways they could be used and they did the rest.

I was SO incredibly impressed with what I was seeing emerging as the day went on. Each and every one did a fantastic job, their imaginations were humming and you could see it in the fabulous pieces that were being created.....they were not simply "copying" the sample, they were each going in their own unique direction, adding beads, using wonderful, unexpected colour and stitch combinations....it was just so cool to observe.

you can see another post about the day from one of the gals who attended here .... Thanks Gail!!!

Working with wool on cotton is a fun way to play with design. When most people hear the word "Embellish", glitz and bling likely come to mind, but that is not what we were doing, We were building layers of texture, just doodling with stitches to enhance the basic design. This technique could be done with any design....for those who love the look of applique but perhaps don't want to do all the prep work to turn under raw edges, this is perfect. Cut the shapes, whip stitch in place and you are ready to add the magic, one stitch at a time.

While I was able to coax mostly everyone in for a group photo, I regret not getting close up photos of each of the pieces in progress...it was amazing to see how different each looked, even though all started with the same basic design, and fabric selections. Thank you for a wonderful day ladies..... I can hardly wait to see the end results.

More Dye Experiments

I am becoming a little obsessed with dyeing threads, it is so easy and yet so rewarding. A few of you have asked if I will post a tutorial....yes, I will do a post showing the supplies and process I use... Please note that there are currently lots and lots of great tutorials to be found online.  I hope to put one together in the very near future, showing how I go about it.

This latest batch consists of 6 strand embroidery floss, some strange cotton skeins that I found, along with some lovely #20 mercerized cotton (it is the finest I have found so far)

Here is a look at where I placed the colour on this skein of 6 strand embroidery floss (it started out white)

here is another skein....before it was wrapped and after...this is that #20 cotton

here you can see the whole batch. I wanted to see what would happen with dye that had been mixed (water only) not activated, but sitting for a week......I was very happy to see that it still worked brilliantly. I also used some plain old Rit dye......it worked well too. Some of these skeins started out white, some off-white, and others were already a soft colour of some sort that I simply "punched" up

Dyeing Session

I have done a little bit of thread dyeing previously, but this time, I experimented with commercial embroidery floss, as well as cotton and even tried some that had metallic thread running through it.

I started with mostly whites, but as you can see in this photo of the thread soaking, I did use a couple of skeins that already had colour

here they are, wrapped and "batching"

I am quite pleased with the results. 

just a little sparkle