Friday, December 31, 2010

Closing 2010


At the end of the year it's good to have some finished stuff, so we can meet the New Year with the new things in mind. That's why I thought that on this very last day I'll show you the pillow I made recently. You could see the progress in the previous posts and now it's just the right time to show the outcome.


I had the plan to use as many stitches as possible so I could learn something new, but after trying a couple of them my nature revealed. That is I like simplicity - in result the pattern on the pillow is quite simple, only a few stitches used. By the way, here you can also see that I like the symmetry as well :).

To sum up, in the centre you can see the greek cross filling, the borders are made with herringbone stitch, the rectangles in both sides - fan stitch. I found all of the stitches in STITCH magazine. In the magazine they were used for other Hardanger project (very beautiful btw).


With the New Year coming I have a new stitching in mind. I'll be boring but this will be Hardanger again and pillow again. However, I'll try to put put some more posts with the progrees, so anybody interested will be able to see Hardanger step by step.
And last but not least - I wish everybody the New Year to be full with fun stitching and cool projects!

Wednesday, December 29, 2010

Always give a chance


I moved the desks at work. On the new one there was a plant that the previous folk had left. The plant was meager and dying. The soil it had, looked like it hadn't been changed for years. I had thoughts of getting rid of it but somehow was pity of this little fellow.


I took it home, gave a new soil, watered and put to sunshine. And what? Only a couple of days passed and the plant started to grow a new leaf. I should give it a name, I guess.

This is the example when the nature teaches us something. This time it taught me - always give a chance. I guess this is something that can apply to stitching as well :). Always give a chance even when at first glance it looks there won't be anything good out of the work.

Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Greek cross pattern

Today I have a short post, as I only wanted to show you the greek cross pattern. It looks very nice and doesn't make a lot of time to make. I also like how the borders look. I found this pattern in Stitch magazine (issue 59).



The rest of the embroidery coming soon :).

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Some blue threads...

Nothing (or hardly anything) encourages to write posts as a new follower. Especially if this is the first one :). Jennifer, WELCOME here.

So this post will be to begin about my recent embroidery piece I've been doing. I thought of a small and quick embroidery. I found a project in Stitch magazine with many interesting stitches, so I decided to play along with them. I don't have a ready pattern, I will use the stiches randomly and will see how it turns out.

For the beginning I decided on using herringbone stitch and greek filling. Herringbone stitch is very useful if you want to create some kind of "border" for your embroidery. In my case it'll be at the top and the bottom. It looks really nice and is easy to stitch:

The greek cross filling is a Hardanger motive. Here you can see the very small part of it. What you can see are in fact only the kloster blocks. They are the basis for Hardanger embroidery. When all the kloster blocks are ready, then some threads inside it are pulled out and the remaining ones are used to form some shape - this will be our Greek cross in the end.

Oh, and the thing I should have mentioned at the beginning - The piece of fabric with the embroidery I'm making will be a part of a pillow. Making a pillow is a good thing to increase my sewing skills.

Friday, December 3, 2010

Stitching and music - Sea Sew Album

I've never thought that music and stitching may have so much in common, but yes - they do. Lisa Hannigan is an Irish singer, she has gentle, soft voice that reminds me of sunny day, gentle wind, green, green grass and me lying there doing nothing :).
In 2008 she released her solo album Sea Sew. What she did (apart from singing) is she stitched all the lyrics that when later on photographed and this way the album layout was made. If you want to read something more about it ans see the photos here's the link to the project itself. If you want to hear the music (and you really should - I think) here's Lisa's MySpace with some of the songs.