A Family Concern

Two of our grandchildren were with us this week. Gramps used his CAD program to draw hearts of various sizes, stars and even Christmas trees. The children cut out the patterns - I cut and stitched the fabric pieces which they stuffed. The real fun followed - they raided my sequin stash and these are a couple of examples. (Only a 10 year old boy would want a smiley on his ornament)!

Embroiderywise, I am trying to make up my mind what might constitute a series. What sort of linkage is necessary to form a unified collection of a number of pieces on the same theme?

The same, or toning, colours and possibly stitches. Do I need aspects of both? Can I do something else? Do I need to make sure that the same style of embroidery is used in each piece? Any ideas on this subject?I would be most grateful for any input.

I have started. I only have a fairly basic idea of what I want to do and it is very fluid at this stage. I am not sure how many pieces there will be. The only given is the subject matter - gum trees (eucalypts), their bark patterns, leaves etc.. My inspiration is no further than the back door and any number of different leaf shapes turn up on the lawn each day. The box lid embroidery in the last entry will not be part of this exercise as it is intended for a gift but I would like to make another piece quite similar. So please don your thinking caps and share your thoughts.

The last of my Christmas photos

I bought pens for the boys and last week I decided that I needed to give them something handmade to go with the pens. The rest of the family would open up handmade gifts on Thursday morning and it didn’t seem quite fair to me for them to miss out. So I found two notebooks and spent nearly a week working out how to make a lined cover for each (and less than a day actually stitching the covers).

This exercise could also have been a TIF offering for June. About 20 years ago my daughter made these interesting screen prints and discarded them. I could not bear to throw them out and have allowed them to mature quietly in the cupboard. I also discovered a remnant of red gabardine from some ancient project that almost matched. These covers are the result – the whole project was a total stash raid!

I have cooked 4 of the 5 Christmas cakes I hope to make – fortunately we like and eat a boiled fruit cake – plenty of whisky makes it very festive! There is other cooking to get done in the next few days so I can’t imagine that I will manage another blog entry before the big day – so Happy Christmas to everyone – have a wonderful day.

Happy Christmas!

Christmas week has arrived and I have finished all the Christmas presents I planned – well almost all. I did intend to make a couple of small items but they feel by the wayside. Surely that is normal - definitely for me. Usually I start Christmas planning with the best of intentions and most of those intentions remain just that! So I am very happy with where we managed to get this year - and absolutely amazed that I have them all wrapped and waiting for Christmas morning. For many years wrapping was something I did at 11.30 on Christmas evening. So some things do improve with age!

I used five of my TIF embroideries as inserts for little wooden boxes that my husband made to fit the embroideries. He has done a wonderful job. These are for our four children and my sister. I hope they like them.

Christmas Cushions

The cushions are finished and ready to be wrapped.

These are gifts for my three granddaughters and they are 6, 7 and 7 years old. They all love pink - however I decided that although I had embroidered with a preponderance of pink threads I needed to make the cushions in another colour.

Amazingly I managed to find some pale green gaberdine in my fabric stash (probably not surprising at all - there is so much fabric in that cupboard.

I am quite happy with the finished result . Thanks to Paula's instruction I lined the covers with carefully (?) quilted fabric - Warm and Natural wadding machine quilted onto some sheeting. I am grateful for Paula's advice as this made a big difference to the finished look of the embroidery on the cushions.

My Christmas stitching is almost finished Maybe I can manage to make one or two embroidered ornaments - I had great intentions to make a number of these for the tree this year but so far have stitched none. There is still a little time. Our tree will go up the week before Christmas when, hopefully, there will be plenty of volunteers for the job and all I have to do is sit and offer advice. Putting up the tree is never a problem but guess who gets to pack it all away in January!