Friday Night Sew In

Can you see the banner on the right? Yes, for the first time I'm going to join in. I'll sit with my sewing machine and will have fun night :). I need to motivate myself somehow: I joined Quilt Along, which is great for me as I sew much more I would do normally. This FNSI event is another great idea to speed up the pace. So I'll do this: ....or this: Cheers!

Mistakes happen

Recently I started new Hardanger embroidery, but a mistake happened. There is a lot of thread counting when you start hardanger, as you have to place the pattern somehow on the fabric. And I did it twice, made sure not to make a mistake...but I did. When I saw what was wrong, I only thought this couldn't go right, how the heck did I count those threads the first time? Here's something for you so you might say - how did she count those threads? The left side is the good one. Those squares should meet right as the navy blue line is. As you can see on the right side they obviously couldn't meet.
But, when you stitch you have to be veeery patient person - so am I. I calmly removed the threads and started all over again. Live.

Quilting around the house

There is not a lot going on with embroidery in my house recently, but there is quite a lot with my sewing machine. So I thought I'd share with you a couple of pictures of what I'm doing. Not sure if I mentioned here already but I fell in love with quilting and now I'm juggling bewteen this and embroidery whenever I have some spare time.

So, quilting - since some time I've been doing the tablemats. Two of them are finished, two of them in the progress. This is how it looks like when done. They are very very far away from perfection, but I'm pleased with them - after all I did them myself :). After joining the blocks I realized that adding the sashing would make them better, but I can live without it.

Second thing I'm doing at the same time is the P2 Quilt Along Project. I haven't heard much about Quilt Alongs and I must admit it's great thing for me. I don't know how it is for you, but it's hard for me to motivate myself and keep on doing things sometimes. So such events are just perfect for me, because they keep me going on without much break :). I was afraid if i could keep the pace and sew the blocks as they come out on the blog, but so far I'm following (heh, probably that's because they had some break now).


Here's the blog Patchwork_2 if you'd like to have a look at this. There's also Flickr page that you can view here . As I'm looking through various pages I can see there is a lot of such events happening and this is just awesome. I'm learning a lot now and just keep practicing, which is so important. I also found Stitch Along event in one of the blogs and probably I'll join this too. It's great to see how huge variety of stithes people can do from one pattern.

Accessories for Hardanger

As for every embroidery you'll need a needle. It can be any that will suit the thread, however if you have a few pennies/ cents to be spent you can buy the needles with a blunt point. They're called tapestry needles. I use the ones with the no. 22 and 24 to match the 5 i 8 pearl cotton threads. So far I only tried the Clover brand so cannot compare to other ones, but I'm pleased with them.
Second thing is the scissors - as the bulk of the work with hardanger is cutting the threads from the fabric. I used the typical scissors for hand embroidery with slim blades. The second cutting tool that I bought and highly recommend is the thread clipper. Not only it's much faster to cut the thread from the ball or skein but it's also very convenient for the drawn-thread embroidery techniques. I bought the Clover one (again) and it was....well, it wasn't cheap. Recently I saw similar one in a shop which costed a couple of PLN (about 1,5$). The difference in price shocked me a bit, but I want to believe that Clover one was worth its price and will serve me for years :). Anyway, regardless of the brand I think the thread clipper is a very useful tool for variety of embroidery techniques.

What's keeping me away from embroidery

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.

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 :).