Stich Explorer: Stitching with Gesso and Molding Paste

Wow. doing these two modern samples took me all weekend. They are about postcard sized, give or take half a cm. They were don using gesso, molding paste, acrylic paints, Tyvek (thin acricultural fleece) linen fabric and embroidery threads. That’s it for my grandiose sampler plans, I know I won’t get it done.

Even these two would need a lot more intense handstitching to turn them into something more than courious samples. But it was fun and I learned a lot. For now, I’m calling them done and this month’s challenge fullfilled. Kudos go to Lynda Monk, the techniques came from her book.

Needleweaving in my Assisi Embroidery

This is a little part of my assisi embroidery. I have used needlewoven bars wildly crossed to add to the general encrusted look. I’m rather pleased with this, and I think it is easier done than tons of french knots and buillon stitches. (although I’m afraid of the latter no more after this piece)

This is a turk’s cap lilly from my garden. They take 5 years from seedling to the first flowers, so I treasure them very much. I like them more than most of the big colourful everyday garden flowers.

Needleweaving finish

Look what I did on sunday! This stitch explorer may challenge really is coming along nicely. I’m planning to use this for something bigger, but I don’t know yet if this will work or not.

My little netbook is really improving my blogging drive – I can sort and prepare photographs on the commute now. I’ll havwe to be careful that this isn’t eating too much of my stitching time.

Casalguidi Stitch

So Sharon B’s may challenge was casalguidi stitch.

I have to say that I never really liked the traditional casalguidi pieces, too many of them looked rather awkward and plump. I wanted to leave out this stitch and finish some of my other stuff instead. But as always Sharon’s stuff was too alluring so I ended up trying it anyway.

Well, my heart was screaming for something mixed media after all this long armed cross stitch on my assisi piece, so that’s what I’m gonna do. The surprise is for some other day, today I will just show how I learned casalguidi stitch.

So first you need padding. I used pearl cotton #3, probably the most expensive joice availiable, but that was what I hd on me on the commute that day. By the way, this is a picture of my second stab at the stitch, forgot to photograph that stage first time round.

I covered it with pearl cotton #8, fand used pearl cotton #5 for the foundation stitches and the raised stem stitch. Here I am halfway through the row of foundation stitches.

For the sake of completeness you can see here how the stem stitches over the foundation stitches are done. I just hope I’ve gotten that step right this time.

Well, I was going to stitch a grub or something similar, all this talk about this stitch looking like a grub on fabric made me do this. For this one, I had cut the batting so that the worm would be tapered at the ends, but now I had the problem that I needed more rows of stem stitch to cover its middle than at the ends. So I added some rows in the middle starting not at the end but a bit in, like shown. At the second end of the worm, I ended this row early the same way at the second end of the worm. The rows on the sides of the worm ran all along it’s ends.

Now meet the finished worm, photographed together with a pencil to give an impression of its 3d form.

And the same from above.

Spiral Trellis Stitch – What I learned about it

I’m still working on my spiral trellis stitch sampler but slowly, because I want to take photographs of the details. I never thought i would enjoy working stumwork – style that much.

Here are some things I learned:
* If you are using an S-plyed thread, such as regular pearl cotton, work clockwise. With a z-plyed thread, such as many rayons and silks, you should probably work counterclockwise. This way, the thread won’t coil up so much.
* You can build all kinds of shapes with this stitch. I think of it as a process more like crochet or makrame than like normal embroidery
* It is good to take a thread of smaller gauge for the top rows if possible, that saves you some decreasing
* when filling forms much longer than wide just decrease at the short ends, bends or corners, where it makes sense to shape the thing, continue until the two sides meet at the top, then stuff and sew the slit shut.
* when doing big shapes, you can decrease with different frequency at different parts of the form to make it irregular rather than round.

Here I try to show how I filled a triangular form: I always decreased at the corners. I decreased quickly to keep it kind of flat. That made for a good shape and little trouble decreasing, but it shows in the pattern. I don’t really know how to avoid that.

Stitch Explorer – Spiral Trellis Stitch

After some failed attempts I figured out how to do spiral trellis stitch. My idea now is to stitch a rock pool – with actually more rocks than colourful sea life, like I remember them to be at the mediterranean sea. The rocks are stuffed spiral trellis stitch.

A closeup of the rocks

Stitch Explorer 1 – Chicken Scratch

It has started: Sharon B’s new challenge stitch explorer. We are supposed to explore an embroidery style or embroidery stitch every month. The first challenge is chicken scratch.
Well, this style of embroidery is completely new to me so I decided to explore the basics before pushing the limits. I’m not sure what gingham fabric is supposed to look like other than the weaving pattern, the one I got is thin cotton usable for shirts, the squares are 0,5 cm side length. Maybe I should have gotten one with bigger squares but I was not sure about long stitches on flimsy fabric.
I’m going to continue on this fabric for a bit, and get more fancy in little steps.