Little sketches I did today

Spring flower sketches
The left one is an English primrose, the right one a Mahonia. Watercolours on chinese Whenzou paper.

So I haven’t been painting much for months, but do want to get back into it. I wanted to bring some of the playfulness I’m learning with embroidery into it, so I started small. I did those fast sketches of spring flowers on chinese sketching paper. This handles liquid almost like tissue paper and is very thin, so it asks for fast brush action and doesn’t really allow for error correction. The results are sure no masterpieces but it was fun to do them and I guess that’s the way to go for me.

Tast 15 Oyster stitch

This is jet another sampler for tast , this time it was oyster stitch .

I have never heard about this stitch before and struggled with it quite a lot. I didn’t find it in a book and following Sharon’s explanations didn’t produce tidy stitches. Then I found another set of instructions at quiter Moments , which worked better. I’m still confused about which stitch is the right oyster stitch, but hers certainly works. It took me some time to get used to this stitch, but now I love how it looks and will continue using it.

The picture, a rubber ducky using a doom wand, is a reflection of the first of April pun in my favourite online game.

tast11 up-and-down buttonhole stitch

I knew I would forget something. If you want to see tast 12-14 just scroll down.

Um. Ok, so this is my tastsampler for week 11, up-and-down buttonhole stitch .

During the time I started it I was struggling with a difficult decision (luckiely the whole thing sort of took care of itself by now). I tried to express my feelings a bit in this piece, so it turned out as another intentional attempt at uglieness. I’m not sure if I like it. But it did give me a lot of practice with this stitch. It is not entirely finished, but not very far from it.

The stitch itself was new to me but not unheard-of. I like many of the effects I got with it, but I also found it tendious to do and not that different from easier buttonhole variants. So while I’ll sure add it to my repertoire I’m probably not going to use it too often. I added in some chain stitch for things i couldn’ easiely achieve with this stitch.

tast14 bonnet stitch

These are the beginnigs of a bonnet stitch sampler for tast.

And no, it is not going to stay as nice and orderly as it began if I get round to acting upon my nefarious plans with it….

Bonnet stitch was completely new to me I have never heard of it before. But thanks to Sharon’s stitch dictionary i had no trouble mastering it, and I must say I like it very much. It gives good structue and makes for a tidy backside.

tast13 knotted cretan stitch

This is my feeble attempt at knotted cretan stitch for the tast challenge. Like i said the week th posting before, i was too busy to do something orderly and only post this for the sake of completion.

I had real trouble to figure this one out and i’m still not entirely sure i’m doing it right. And before you wonder, this is supposed to become a dungeon entrance one day. P&P roleplaying instead of stitching may give you weird ideas.

tast12 couching stitch

This is the couching sampler for tast .

Couching in all forms is an old favourite of mine, most of my samplers have couching in it. So I decided I can go wild with this one. I did some spring cleanup in the week I started this, and used many of the bits and pieces that surfaced in the process. The organza piece is a failed and abandoned stab at a buttonhole sampler. Part of the crochet yarn is simply couched, the other is sewn under the organza. The background fabric is a piece of cheap cotton I used to practiced drawn thread work (the little holey area in the upper left corner). The rest is just random kipple. The knitting wool was arranged somewhat randomly and then sewn over with many straight stitches.

This is so not done, there are even pins visible holding the organza in place. I had a stressful month, and that was bad for chatch up. But I decided to at least learn every new stitch and plan something to do with it, so that i won’t feel completely out of the loop. Now I post what i have for the sake of the community experience, although it’s somewhat embarrassing.

Tenar

TAST10 Barred chain stitch

New week, new sampler for tast. This time it was barred chain stitch, including alternating barred chain stitch.

I still felt uninspired. Also, this stitch was completely new to me, in German embroidery books even twisted chain stitch, which forms one part of this stitch, is done slightly differently. So because I couldn’t seem to think up enough variations for a regular sampler I decided to do something figurative. There was this lunar eclipse, that seemed like a good topic.

The reddish knitting yarn that forms the moon was felted down in a spiral with some beige wool roving, the rest is all barred chain stitch. Most of it is done in that thin wool yarn that you use to strengthen the heels and tips when knitting socks. That is the closest thing to wool embroidery yarn I’m able to obtain locally, and I like to work with it very much. I don’t think I’m entirely done with this one, but it already looks OK and shows you can get away with any odd stitch on such pictures.

TAST9 cross stitch

So this is my stab at the the next tast sampler, cross stitch .

Cross stitch somehow left me uninspired. Maybe because I was generally uninspired this week, so this little scrap was all i did. On the right hand side, there is shading in rice stitch, on the left hand side shading in reversed cross stitch. I found that one in Therese de Dillmont’s Encyclopaedia of needlework. You first do alternatingly one normal cross stitch and one upright cross stitch, then you do a second row, working normal cross stitches over the upright ones and vice versa. The upper thread can be thinner than the other for best effect.

The numbers are my attempt at designing cross-stitched numbers which are as small as possible.

fly stitch background, and other tast progress

Now, the next two stitches would have been algerian eyelet and feather stitch. For both, i made plans, prepared backgrounds and collected materials. All this took way too long, so although i had caught up with the January stitches by now I was getting behind again and decided to do the current stitch, which was fly, and continue with those two later.

The most notable event of the fly stitch week was the caipirinha party a friend gave for her birthday, so it was going to be about that. For the background, I wanted to do some hand needlefelting on a batist background, using stuff from my thread leftover bag, and attach a bit of green jute band at the bottom. But the felting went like a lesson how not to needle felt, so it took more than 30 hours to do what you see and i got behind again. So, there’s not a single fly stitch on this one yet.

TAST5 chevron stitch

OK, this is yet anothersampler done for take a stitch tuesday , Sharon B’s embroidery challenge. This time, it’s chevron stitch . I knew this stitch before, but didn’t particularly enjoy it and never used it creatively.

On the one hand, I couldn’t think of anything to do with it exept a somewhat traditional band sampler, on the other hand I didn’t feel like doing one because I don’t really enjoy counted work ( exept when it gives me opportunity to draw threads out and do lacy stuff). So I tried to show my disgust in the colour sheme. It turned out way too nice imho. The countable fabric is a leftover from an abandoned crochet project, the rest is random scraps attached with needlefelting and crochet.

The drawn thread border at the top is from a German needlework brochure. I don’t think chevron stitch works particularly well as a drawn thread stitch because it tends to loose shape when pulled hard enough to form nice thread bundles.