[WIP] Golden Hardanger Doily

It's been a long, long time since I showed any embroidery. So, it's highest time to change that :). I'd like to show you what I've been working on for some time. It's my favorite, lovely Hardanger. The pattern comes from Yvette Stanton's book: "Elegant Hardanger Embroidery" and it'll be square doily. However, I decided not to use classic white colors, as seen in the book but instead to try this pattern on light yellow fabric and stitch it with dark gold thread. There's a lot to stitch and then cut, so I have no idea when I finish it but whenever I have a couple minutes here or there, I try to stitch. It's a small project so it's easy to take it wherever I go.

The doily will be around 28x28 cm. Materials I use: Zweigart Lugana light yellow fabric (color nr 274); DMC Pearl Cotton nr 5 and 8 dark gold (color nr 783).

Hardanger tablecloth started

When I wrote about this tablecloth I mentioned I had some more red fabric. Well, to be concise I ordered 10m of it once. For the tablecloth I used 2,5m, which means I still have quite a lot of it. Recently, I started doing another 2,5m tablecloth - this time I wanted to have some border embroidered and this is what I'm working at now. It looks quite nice. I don't know what to embroider in the center of it, yet. Probably, I'll use these stitches as well, so the center matches the border.

Last week, we had a warm, sunny weather - almost summer one. So, I thought it would be good idea to stitch outside. Well, it turned out I didn't do much but I managed to lose the needle somewhere in the grass. The good side of it is that I took these photos, which is - I think - enough compensation for the lost tool.

I realize it looks boring to see new posts that look like the old ones - red fabric, red thread, red tablecloth. But I have some plans to start learning long and short embroidery and to show the progress of learning here. Though, knowing my amount of free time that may not happen as soon as I'd wish. Please, please be patient :).

Hardanger tablecloth {completed work}

Finally, I finished Hardanger tablecloth. When I look back in my posts I started doing this one in May, so it took me 1/2 year to make it. The tablecloth measures about 1,3m x 2,4m and it has the embroidery in the centre. As it is so big, the emmbroidery looks tiny, but in fact it required quite a lot of work to finish it.

I have always the same problem with stitching that I think it will be something fast and simple and it turns out quite the opposite. But hey, we're not doing this to make the time records, right? I spent good time working on this one and this is what counts.

I still have this red fabric in my stash, so will make more of such goodies, but this time wil need to think of other pattern. I'm also planning to make some sort of border around the edges.

And I just finished this tablecloth in time to link it to Celebrate Color that finishes this month.

Fabric and threads for Hardanger

When doing the current project - i.e. another pillow with hardanger, I thought of making some sort of step by step tutorial in case any of you would be interested in trying hardanger. So, this is the first part of it.
Before you start any kind of embroidery you need to have two things - fabric and threads. For hardanger the fabric has to be the even weave type. The essential part of this embroidery is removing part of the threads from the fabric so to create the pattern and only the even weave fabric enables that. So far I had the fabrics of two manufacturers: DMC and Zweigart. DMC offers good quality fabrics for a decent price, Zweigart ones are much more expensive but I believe this comes with a better quality. Also Zweigart offers much bigger variety of colors. When you need colors like red, dark green or brown I think only Zweigart offers such.
Another thing about fabric is the number it has. You may see something like 22ct, 25ct and it stands for the number of threads to the inch. This means that the higher the number is the more dense the fabric you get. Also, the same pattern will become smaller on the more dense fabric. The fabrics with smaller number should be easier to embroider, however I would not buy the fabric with smaller number than 20ct. This one is loose enough to cut the threads easily and I'm afraid that the ones with a smaller number wouldn't look nice for such things as a tablecloth or a pillow. To compare - the ecru fabric on the photo is 20ct, the red one 25ct.

Now, the threads. If you read some books you'll read about pearl cotton. It's a thread with 2 twisted stands. You can also read it's doubled mercerised. Till today I had no idea what it means but for purposes of this blog I decided to check :). Here's what you can find in Wikipedia:
Mercerisation is a treatment for cotton fabric and thread that gives fabric a lustrous appearance. The process is applied to materials like cotton or hemp.
The threads also have its numbers: no.3, 5, 8 and 12 - the higher number the thinner the thread. For hardanger you need two sizes of the threads. The size of thread depends on the count of the fabric you'll choose.
As a less expensive replace for pearl cotton I used DMC Petra thread with quite good effect.