Sashico pillow - hanazashi stitch

Here's the second Sashico pattern I finished recently. It's called hanazashi, which means flower stitch. This is the second Sashico pillow I made. I thought of making a pair that would be made the same style, but still remain different. I'm glad how it came out and I think this embroidery is great to decorate the house.

Now, I will make a break with it but it looks great to me so for sure I'll come back to it once and will try other patterns. There are plenty of them and they can be used in many different combinations.

There are a couple books about Sashico, the one I decided to buy for myself was "The Ultimate Sashico Sourcebok" of Susan Briscoe. To me it contains all that book about embroidery should have:

1. some information about the origins and the history of the embroidery - in fact in this book it is very detailed, including many photos of some old things made with Sashico
2. part about tools, fabrics, threads needed
3. various examples and projects where Sashico can be used - coasters, table mat, greeting cards, curtains
4. finally, the list of all the various patterns

If someone wabts to try out these patterns, then this book will be a good source. Though, I had to read the info on how to make the patern a couple times before I figured out all about it. Once I did for one it was fine for the second as well.

First sashico pillow ready, second to go...

This is so very wrong - there are two things I made last year that I still haven't shown here. You can think of some punishment to me for such a delay. But...to not make bad even worse I'm showing the first thing now.

I finished Sashico embroidery for my pillow and put it all together, so now I can have this beautiful piece in my room. Now, I'm working on the second Sashico pillow, as two are better than one :). There are so many variations of Sahico patterns than one can do it a long long time and still create something different. As I read the book about Sashico I could see lots of pictures where a couple of different patterns were used for one thing and it looks just amazing. It's something new I tried and definitely I'll do more Sashico stuff in the future.

As for the "technical" sort of information :): when you look at some pages dedicated to this embroidery you'll see there are specialty fabrics and threads for this, but I just worked on the ones I had at hand and the results are quite good. I used cotton blue fabric that I bought for the Roman curtain and white Petra DMC thread no.8 (similar to pearl cotton). The only "professional" piece I used for it were the Sashico needles.

I also decided to make my own buttons for this pillow with a small pattern on it. Some time ago I saw the button kit that you can make customized buttons with. Why not another cool gadget to my sewing stuff - I thought. It came out very well, though the fabric was quite thick and I had to play a while to make the button. Here's the kit in case you haven't seen such. It can be bought on Etsy and there is variety of sizes to please everybody ;).

On the next post I'll show you the quilt I finished last year. I need to make some photos first. Unfortunately, the weather isn't very pleasing now (no sun:() but hopefully I'll manage this somehow.

Sashico (simple is cool)

Some time ago I showed a photo with blue piece of fabric and marked square grid on it (here). And I still owe you the explanation. It's been a while I wanted to learn sashico embroidery. I bought a book that waited for good times and finally here they came :). To give you some insights - the embroidery looks very simple, after all it's "only" a running stitch that has to be made. But the beauty I find in it is how this simple stitch can be turned into sophisticated pattern. And when you combine a couple of different patterns together it is just amazing.

So, at first I chose the pattern that I thought was quite simple and tried this on the small piece of fabric that you already saw in previous post. But when trying this out it came not so simple and I managed to make one or two mistakes. So, I decided to choose even simpler pattern. I started working on this and still I managed to make one mistake. Fortunately, it is very easy to remove "wrong" threads and fix it. After that everything went well.

What is the difficulty in this? I didn't use the ready pattern (now I know they are available to buy) but worked on the square grid. So, the trick is to imagine on the grid how the pattern will look like and where the stitch will go. There are some rules to follow, like the stitch cannot cross, so you have to imagine when they will meet to make it right as well.

The fabric I'm using is the leftover from the roman shade I made for one room. I was left with enough fabric for 2 pillows, so for the second one I'll make another sashico pattern. This time I decided to make a pillow closed with buttons - but this is a story for another post, as the buttons are not so simple buttons ;).