Stitchscape Pebbles

I have been feeling very pebbly lately and inspired to try some new stitches on my pebbles, including the detached chain stitch flowers, wagon wheel flowers and fly stitch leaves. I'm not sure how well the more three-dimensional flowers will hold up in the pebble bag but hopefully they are small enough to hold together. I really love them and have been enjoying playing with the colour combinations.

For those that may have not seen my pebbles before I must state that they are not real pebbles I just call them pebbles because they are sort of a pebblish shape and it's kind of where the idea for them came from- along with a need to make small things out of my tiniest of scraps.
These are stuffed with wadding and backed with felt so aren't even heavy, but can be made into brooches, magnets or just popped in a printers tray or on a bookcase for a splash of colour. It's a great way for me to practise different colour combinations and hone my techniques too.

This batch was made all in the same hoop. I draw around my template on the back until it's full, then add two fabrics per pebble, tacking those down and stitching within the template lines. Once every pebble is stitched, I cut around the shapes and draw them up around cardboard with wadding stuffed between the layers, felt is stitched to the back and more wadding stuffed between those layers! You can make your own if you so wish as I have put my templates and ideas together with some fabrics, threads and other bits and pieces into a kit, available in my Etsy shop.

I like to add lots of layers to these little pebbles and have a similar routine for each one, starting with lines of straight stitch covering the whole pebble. The flowers normally come after that and then leaves, followed by little french knot Foxglove type things. Unless I'm trying something new of course.

My pebbles did really well at the Christmas shows so I am stocking up. I only had one big pebble left so my next hoop had four big pebbles and a little one to fill the gap. You can see how they are made and pieced together in these photos. I have to do quite a bit of flipping backwards and forwards to check I am still stitching within the lines which is where the initial straight stitches help because I can see where I'm going without having to keep turning the hoop over.

The big ones are slightly more involved though as I use three fabrics and turn the bottom one into a foreground. From my Bartholomew's Oasthouse Stitchscape I had quite a bit of leftover scraps of acrylic yarn still floating around in one of my thread boxes which was all nice and gnarly so I couched that down to the edge of the bottom fabric and played with knots and random straight stitches before working upwards to the fun part.

I experimented with adding the leaves after the flowers and before- which ended up staying as just leaves with some french knots because I really liked how the leaves laid on top of each other. The different greens look lovely.

 

I am still having fun playing with these so I can see more hoops stuffed with pebbles in my future!!