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 ;).

Celebrating Autumn

On the prevoius post I mentioned about Celebrate Color event that is going on for the next 3 months. I love such things, as they are great insiration to me and also quite good motivation to make something new. So, kudos to Rachel for organising this.

I was worried a bit that with lack of time I won't be able to join, but I decided to use some scraps to make an Autumn inspired pillow. Once I made such tablemats and I still had some fabrics left + nine patch squares ready for use. So I came up with such a simple pillow that is now proudly decorating my living room. For me personally brown is the first color I think of in terms of Autumn (though there are many more I'd put in this category as well).

Though the pillow is very simple, there were some "done for the first time" things for me.

Instead of envelope closure I added the zipper to it. I wouldn't do it if I didn't find a tutorial. I know there are many helpful tutorials on the Internet for this tricky stuff, but I used this one - thank you Katie :). Another first time thing is I tried to finish the quilt using in-the-ditch method, as I was just curious of how it would look like in the end. It looks nice, but I will wait some time till I try it again, at least when using my sewing machine. I sew on very slow motion, but still it was hard for me to keep exactly along the seam - more experience needed :). So, I'll do some more sewing and then maybe one day I'll try again.

Oh, and in case you wanted to know, the fabrics I used are from Moda Cherrish Nature collection. I also used one of these fabrics for the back of the pillow:

I have also one more pillow in my mind, this time with some hand stitching part. If time allows I'll try to make it for next month' Celebrate Color.

One update to this - as Wendy suggested me, I'm linking this post to her "Learn a New Technique" webside. By the way it's great idea to share our new endeavors in craft :).

Blogger Pillow Contest

It will look like a repeated post a bit but Stitched in Color is hosting a Bloggers Pillow Party so I decided to join in with my recent work. I love embroidery and wanted to try a couple of stitches. You can see the results on the pillow. The stitches include herringbone stitch, greek cross and fan stitch. It was quite fun work for a person with little spare time (= me) as I was able to make it reasonably fast.

Here you can see the stitches in detail:














If you'd like to see other pillows in the contest or join it here's the link. There are already many interesting pillows and I'd like to have at least half of them :).

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!

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.