stitching – something from seaview

Felt Christmas tree decorations

Of recent years, I’ve enjoyed making little felted treasures to adorn my Christmas tree – and sending them out to family and friends for their Christmas trees too. It started with a class I attended with the very talented Lorna of Stitchbirdie in West Kilbride. She taught me how to make felted paisley botehs …So that year I made a bowlful and sent them off to friends and family for Christmas …The year after that I made felted stars (and wrote about them here) …Then last year, come Advent-tide, I found myself stitching little felt hearts …This year I decided to stitch felt Christmas trees …As a couple of friends have expressed interest in how I make these trees, this blogpost explains my method.

I started with a Christmas tree template. Here it is on an A4 background to give an idea of the size of my felted Christmas trees (hopefully this image can just be printed out) …I converted my paper template into card and then used that to trace and cut out the felt trees …There was a very loveable impediment when I found Eggy comfortably ensconced in my box of felt …But once you have moved your Eggy and cut out your felt Christmas trees …… the fun thing is to plan what to put on them! I got out all sorts of treasures from my stores – beads, threads, glitter, sequins …… and fabrics! These fabrics are all selected for the tinyness of the details printed on them. I can cut these details out and appliqué them onto the felt trees – like these Day of the Dead images (perhaps a bit surprising on a Christmas tree, but this one is for my daughter who loves that Mexican festival) …I also cut out a lot of flowers from the Japanese cherry blossom fabric – they convey a wonderfully fragile beauty to the little trees they decorate …Old plastic stencils come in handy …… for cutting out little multi-coloured felt circles – so very effective when stitched on with some contrasting floss …With all my goodies assembled, I began to play …Finally having worked out how I was going to make my little trees, I settled in to stitch cosily – until the cats made it rather difficult, taking over the sofa …Then I heard from an Instagram friend of mine, Janine, that her niece, Kimmy, had been inspired by my pictures to make her own felt tree – this time decorated with buttons! Such an excellent idea, Kimmy – I hadn’t thought of buttons! So I went back to the drawing board – or more accurately – my mother’s treasured and battered old button tin …And emptied the contents out … what treasure, but alas, mostly rather large …Nevermind, I managed to find enough small buttons to have a productive play. (All of which had to be done discreetly as my husband suffers from koumpounophobia) …So, the felt trees are cut, the decorations sorted, here’s the procedure …First I stitched the pinned fabric and felt decorations in place using two strands of DMC floss …Then I added the buttons. This is tricky enough because you can’t easily pin them, but definitely not helped when Ilsa comes to sit near you … I joined the decorations together with a sparkly chain stitch to simulate the string of Christmas lights festooning our proper trees … And then I added some sequins – a bit OTT, I know, but I do love to pack the decorations on my real and felt Christmas trees …When they’re stitched in place (like the buttons a bit tricky as you can’t pin them), it’s time to stitch the plain back (no decorations on the back!) to the front with blanket stitch …Blanket stitch right round the tree, remembering to stich the rbbon tag in place at the top as you go along …When you have stitched all the way round except at the bottom of the stump …… it’s time to stuff your felt trees. I used sheep fleece (but any toy stuffing would do) …I don’t stuff the trees very hard because I like them soft and a bit squidgy. Time to blanket stitch around the stump, and you’re finished …The really fun thing is that I can make each one completely different, designing them with the recipient in mind. This blue-flowered one was done for my mother because she is nuts about the colour blue …I love it when I have a bowl or pin -wheel full of variegated little felties – all ready to go off in the post to their new homes. Why there are some cat and daruma ones there too! Happy Christmas everyone!(If you want to make a felted Christmas tree, I hope you find all the info you require here. If not, please do get in touch with me.)

Alabama Chanin Style

I started my Alabama Chanin style dress well over two years ago – though it had been bubbling away in my mind for much much longer. Now I will always think of it as a Lockdown project because it is over these last few weeks that I have worked with most dedication and enthusiasm.

Way, way back in 2016 I was looking carefully at two little Japanese books I’d inherited from my father’s family. Nobody in the family today seemed to know very much about them. These pictures below show the covers, frontispieces and a couple of content pages …There were pages and pages of wonderful illustrations and designs …I can’t read Japanese, and my father (who had been able to read Japanese) died in 2015, so I decided to put these illustrations up on my Instagram account in search of a translator …And I got one! Apparently these two little books were published in Tokyo in 1884 and 1881 respectively. The top book contains arabesque patterns for kimonos and the lower book shows crests and symbols of Japanese clans and families.

How did they come to my family, we wondered? Luckily my mother remembered the answer to that. Apparently my paternal great-grandmother had been an enthusiastic patron of all things Japanese, and is believed to have acquired these little books for her library … what treasure … I couldn’t really believe it …Anyhow – jumping forward to me and my humble little stitching plans, I found myself with a most fabulous resource of illustrations just made for embroidery and other designs ..

What I’d always wanted to do was to stitch myself a dress using the Alabama Chanin style of embroidery. This involves working with a double layer of fabric. Cutaways and very simple embroidery stitches make the pattern …I started with a practice piece using a variation of the leaf pattern above and working with old cotton t-shirts (as recommended in the book). And yes, I got a little bit carried away with the embroidery, but most importantly what I discovered was that I hated sewing cotton knit fabric. My needle struggled to pierce the fabric …As it happened, I had found a double layer dress of very light woven cotton on Ebay … Just perfect, so now to find my pattern. I went back to my little Japanese pattern books, and selected a beautiful and quite simple design of falling maple leaves …I particularly associate maple trees with my father. He was always trying to make little bonsai trees with them during my childhood …With the image scanned from the little Japanese book, I then enlarged it and printed it out on stiff paper. That’s my template sorted. Now to cut the leaves out …I worked very slowly at first, sometimes adding pattern by tracing through the template …And sometimes building up the design by placing the maples leaves cut out from the template where I thought they might be effective …Either way, there was always that tricky moment of cutting the fabric …But then the fun starts and I could start stitching! Very basic running stitch round the leaves …Using a washable marker to ink in the maple leaf details …Stitching the details in with stem stitch …The stalks were stitched in chain stitch. Adding more colour …I’d completed the front of the dress …And moved the pattern over the shoulder and round to the back of the neck …When I came to a halt. Not really sure why. But the project sat unloved for a year or so …

Until the virus struck this summer. I came back to the project like a madwoman – I guess Lockdown has a strange effect on us all. I found myself stitching madly and enthusiastically …Adding pattern to the sides of the dress …So that the maple leaves moved down the back, and round the body …Producing this trailing effect …I love this pic of the dress held up to the light so you can see all the little maple leaves silhouetted through the body …Finally just to hem it … and ta-dah! It’s finished! I am so pleased with the way it spirals round the sides …Under the arm …And, of course, down the back …What a fascinating mix of cultures and times and history are worked into it – the historic Japanese prints, the South-Eastern American techniques of Alabama Chanin, and me, at the vortex as it were, with a family connection to Japan, stitching away in the very north of England in the early 21st century Coronavirus Lockdown …

A summer’s stitching …

I can tell autumn is on it’s way – not from that chill morning smell in the air, nor the blowsiness of the garden … No, it’s because I am all stitched out for this summer …

Last year, a visiting American friend brought me some lovely presents – two little hand-made bags and an exquisite glass heart – all charmingly wrapped up in a little flowery handkerchief …About the same time, another dear friend (this time from Nice) sent me some of her left-over fabric scraps – knowing how much I enjoy piecing odd little stitcheries together …Well, somehow these bits and pieces came together, and before I knew what it was June – and that little handkerchief was the centrepiece of a summer doodle stitchery … I don’t know why earlier incarnations of this piece escaped the roving eye of my iPhone, but there it is, they did. I think it is because I struggled – I really struggled – to get this piece going further. Frankly, I struggled even to enjoy the stitching …

What changed for me round about June was that I eventually began to train myself to look at my stitchery differently. It continued to be a bit of a struggle for a while. But I found I could stop aiming for a finished product, and focus on the particular, the different constituent parts of this embroidery. And how very different they all are!

There are twittering birds. With embroidered French knots those little birds began to twitter more and more …The cats’ glasses became even more extravagant …Their bow-ties flashier …The Mayan figures (scraps from my daughter) got glasses too …And little Japanese doll companions …One Mayan figure sprouted cats from its head …Which grew more and more elaborate as the stitching went on …Until there was a great totem pole of be-glassed cats …In the centre of the panel the flowers grew more ornate …With little decorative centres …Embroidered dragonfly hovered about them … (Copied from another stitchery of mine) …Another fabulous fabric bundle of scraps arrived, this time from my friend Claire …Did you see the silk cloud fabric just peeking out at the top from under the cat? Well, all of a sudden there were clouds in my stitching … little ones …And big ones too …And medium sized ones as well …And some time in the stitching, it began to snow little cherry-blossom flowers …I spent many evenings cutting out these fiddly little fabric pieces …Pinning them on …Suddenly there were loads of them …I am sad to say (but not surprised to record) that the kits were no respecter of my work …Finding it a comfortable pad from which to survey their domain …And boy does Eggy love my embroidery basket!Earlier this month I realized I was approaching the time when it all needed to be drawn together – it needed a border. Perhaps blue seashell fabric? Hmmm, I think not …But I could pick out that turquoise spotty fabric? No, too swimming … Now how about some dark ikat fabric? Ah, now that’s worth trying! It’s a surprisingly light fabric so needed some gentle wadding folded into the frame …And a nice bit of stitching along the ikat border to hold it all in place …Now for some final cherry blossom snowflakes to tie it all together …The outer dark ikat border is transformative, sending the inner dark border of the original handkerchief into recess, as though a window opening onto another world. I am so very pleased! It has to be time to finish stitching …

My weird and wonderful world of birds and cats
with glasses …

Just a bit of summer fun …

Doodling a stitchery …

Or stitching a doodle … I’m not really sure …But I do know that I started this piece in the most playful of manner, with just some pieces of fabric machined together – perhaps originally I was thinking of making a GiveWrap? And then I took a turn off (veered to the right as it were), and starting adding pictures and scraps, and embroidering, stitching them …
Some were strong images cut out from fabric … And others were just pieces I found in my scraps, exactly as they were…Scraps from all sorts of places. Those strong green flowers came from my dear friend Mandy’s cast-off dress. And the vibrant yellow silk lines were an unintended gift from my cousin Polly – beautiful scraps of sari silk used to wrap up a GiveWrap …Happy stitching through the winter months, playing idly with fabrics and keeping the cats company as they bird-watched. My favourite times …My stitchery grew. I had started to add faces …I am fascinated by stitched faces. One of my favourite feeds on Instagram is Spiritcloth who with such skilled dyeing and stitching produces pieces like this …So small green faces crept into my work too. I never quite knew how they would appear. They always started quite similarly – just a couple of scraps of green fabric, pinned together …I was nervous about stitching them, but I needn’t have been. They took on a life of their own. Some were catty …Some were sleeping …Another had a fawn-like appearance, I thought – especially when it became clear they wanted beards …So they all got beards – some wispy …Some luxurious, as with the Roi Soleil …The cat has a fine beard too, complementing its whiskers!And a few beardy wisps too for the sleepy one – perhaps to complement those wisps of hair …My piece was now growing, and I was no longer thinking of it as an idle doodle. It demanded to be seen as a whole – with backing (a lovely cotton Ikea duvet from a local charity shop) …And, once I started to see it as a whole, I had to think of balance. It needed some more of those strong yellows – and it needed poetry …
There usually comes a point when I am stitching when words come into my mind that I might stitch into the work in hand. Some of my embroideries have been stitched around text as in my Love Letter to Europe …With others, the words sort of drift in as I stitch away. So it was with my Chinese Vase embroidery. For a long time it was just fabric pieces and embroidery … Then – as I stitched – some of Eliot’s words from the Four Quartets (Burnt Norton) came to mind: “as a Chinese jar Still moves perpetually in its stillness.”It was T.S Eliot’s Four Quartets (Burnt Norton) that came to my mind again as I stitched those little green faces …
A little fiddling around with size and placement: “Go said the bird … for the leaves were full of children … hidden excitedly, containing laughter … quick said the bird … find them, find them …”And then some stitching …At first I was disappointed that it’s so hard to make out Eliot’s words and I wondered about re-stitching them. But I decided that the almost-hidden words was in keeping with the sense of looking: Quick, said the bird, find them, find them …
My stitchery was drawing to an end. Time now to add the backing, and quilt it with some comfortable sashiko stitching …The cats approved …As the border stitching drew to an end, I thought – well, perhaps I’ll just add a little extra stitching here … and there … and there. I realised that I’ve grown accustomed to having this stitchery around to pick up for a little stitching here or there. The time had come to finish it.

By happy coincidence I was introduced at this time to the old Navajo belief that the spirit of the weaver literally enters the cloth they are weaving. In an article on the Spirit of the Cloth in the Spring 2018 edition of Spin Off magazine, Rebecca Marsh describes how the Navajo weave a spirit line from inside the border to the edge of the of the weaving to allow the weaver’s spirit to leave the cloth.

I needed a spirit line!

My spirit line – my escape from this stitchery – was to add my initials and the date.
Finished!

My weird and wonderful world of birds and cats with glasses …

My weird and wonderful world of birds and cats
with glasses …