The Full 2022 Stitchscape Swap Collection!

In my last post I said how amazing it was that at the beginning of last year I put out a suggestion on my Dotty Textiles social media pages, tentatively enquiring whether anyone would be interested in making two cards a month on a set theme, with a view to swapping with anyone else who sent a card in. I wasn't at all sure that there would be enough interest and was about 60% certain that it would fall completely flat and only have two people say they'd like to join. 

Imagine my absolute surprise and joy when I had an initial response of about ten people! It doesn't seem very many considering how many people follow the pages and how many lovers of embroidery and textiles there are out there, but ten was a viable number to start up a swap and I was absolutely thrilled. The enjoyment I get from receiving these cards is huge, looking at them closely to try and figure out how the stitches were made, feeling the different textures and layers that have been included. The swap is open to everyone from all skill sets and all comfort levels but I think that this makes it all the more interesting - even the simplest of stitches can be astounding and brilliant, part of the challenge is keeping these pared back so that they fit into a normal envelope, which can be restricting for certain techniques and, due to their size, composition is often key. Just because they are small doesn't mean they are easy to make, and often take an amazing amount of time depending on how complicated and involved you get into the process, but at the end of it all, it should be fun! 

They are a wonderful way to try a new technique, or to use up your small scraps and can make you step out of your comfort zone a little to try and find the perfect material to use to create the image in your head (or from your paper if you are a sketcher first). 

I don't know if I've stepped that far out of my comfort zone, I have a style and like to think it's fairly recognisable, but I enjoyed coming up with the idea of using a hole punch to create leaves from paper for the Autumn Blaze theme, and using felt in different ways to create shapes or pad sections out. 

I like landscapes so most of mine are landscape themed, and I've kept all of the cards as portrait so that they fit together as a set so that I can see the change in seasons and potentially in colours. I designed the cards as each month came up so they haven't been made to fit together, I was just curious to see if they would and I think they do. 

I have been hugely invested in this swap I have to admit, and still am. It has been a strange year for me being on maternity leave for most of the time and, especially just after Finley arrived, when I didn't know which way was up or what day it was - having this swap to run gave me a sense of the outside world when most of my world was centred and concentrated on this tiny being. It's been harder than I thought it would be to suddenly not be able to stitch whenever I wanted to and for things that used to take me a day to finish, suddenly taking weeks because I have to be someone else's world and everything else takes a back seat. 

I don't begrudge this time at all, it has just been nice to keep a little something back for me and to have a reason to sit down in the evenings when all is quiet and sew these little cards. The house may be a complete mess from the day's activities and there might be a hundred other chores I'm meant to be doing, or I might have been in my dressing gown all day and not brushed my hair for two - but these cards have represented me time, and that's what I'll think of when I look at them. 

Embroidery as a hobby is a bit like that anyway, it creates a breathing space in your head whilst your hands slowly create a wonderful image in front of you. It's a methodical and steady process, which forces you to just sit and be still, zone in on what you are doing and take time for you. In a way it's similar to yoga, just without the exercise part!

I really hope that when the other members who joined in with the 2022 swap look at their own collections they have their own memories intertwined with the cards they have created, and that it has been peaceful and enjoyable for them too!

This set of gorgeous cards are the ones that I have ended up with from each swap. Obviously a perk of being the host is that you can often choose the ones that you really love or intrigue you first, but I also had to be fair and go with my spreadsheet (what a lifesaver that spreadsheet is!) because I had promised that everyone would have a card from a different person each month. That isn't to say that I don't love all of these cards - it was often a hard choice to make and I would pick out several ones, then turn them over and consult my spreadsheet to see if I could have one of them. These have all be chosen for a specific reason. 

Toward the end of the year, as people started dropping out for various reasons, I did have to send out cards that some may have had a card from before, but I made sure that it was as early on in the year as possible so it wasn't consecutive. I love that I could generally start to tell who cards had been made by before I even looked at the back of the card, some people seemed to really grow in confidence through the swap and some already had a distinctive style. Others used the opportunity to play with different techniques every month so you weren't quite sure who the cards were by. 

From left to right, the cards are by:

Top Row: Diane, Sarah, Lon, Suzi

Middle Row: Jacquie, Tracy, Linda, Sandra

Bottom Row: Abi, Suzi, Sarah, Tracy

(And I've just realised that for the monthly themes the firework and pumpkin pieces are the wrong way round!) 

I love the differences in these cards. They feature machine stitching, stumpwork, painting, fabric dyeing, collage, real shells, hand embroidery... All of them are playful and fun to look at with so many textures! I can't take enough photos of them to try and show you the different layers and weights of thread, types of thread, trimmings used in fun ways. They are just beautiful, plain and simple. 

This is the whole collection from 2022 (cards all in the right order now), both sides of the story merged, my cards and the cards I swapped for. It's almost like a temperature blanket, don't you think? Divided in half diagonally, the bottom left corner has rich earthy colours with bright oranges and deep blues, but the top right corner has pale yellows and blues with silvery tones. 

I would love to see what the other collections look like - do they all fit together and work as a collection? Are there any clashing cards?

I'd also like to know that the favourite months or themes were - and from you too, which month did you enjoy seeing the most? Was there a stand out collection?

A reminder of the themes:

January: Snow Capped ..... February: Winter Sun ..... March: Daffodils/The Coming of Spring

April: Rainbow Showers ..... May: Bluebells ..... June: By or Under the Ocean

July: Summer Meadow ..... August: Sunset Mountains ..... September: Woodland Walks

October: Autumn Blaze ..... November: Starry Night Sky ..... December: Festive Greenery

I've currently got mine stored in these ATC folders from Papermania. I don't know if they are still making these, I came across a couple of empty folders from the ATC days of 2011 so I've utilised those. These cards would look fantastic framed though! If you had a big frame and float mounted them so that they stood out, it would look really lovely. Has anyone got any other plans for their cards? 

I'll have to show you some of the cards I discovered from 2010/2011 in their folders. The Mother has been clearing out cupboards in her house and in one of them she discovered three folders stuffed full of ATCs, I've also got photo albums of the postcards that we also made, as well as a box of inchies! I think we'll stick to ATCs for now though. 

I know I've said it a gazillion times before but thank you for joining in or following along! It means a lot. 

December Festive Greenery ATC Swap

 

Last week I was finally able to swap these wonderful last entries to the 2022 Stitchscape swap and get them sent out to their new homes, completing collections of artwork up and down the country (and in the USA!).

I don't know what I thought would come out of the theme idea 'Festive Greenery' but I love the variety that is shown in these cards. So many different representations of what people think of with those two words. Festive doesn't necessarily mean Christmas; to me it is when the clocks go back and it starts getting dark all of the time, the last plants hanging on and making the outside green are the evergreens like holly, ivy, pine, fir, mistletoe, rosemary, laurels... 

These are the ones that start appearing in houses, on doors, in vases, in table displays and on mantlepieces, taking your mind off of the bare branches and stark colours outside your window. It's been this way for hundreds of years with many cultures using the signs of life in winter as a way to look forward to the oncoming summer and giving thanks for another year. 

I don't know that we are so connected to nature in the way that our ancestors were, and had to be, our vegetables come from the shops and we can have non-native blooms delivered through letterboxes by the postman, rather than having to rely on what we could grow or cut down to use as tools or firewood for warmth, light and as a way to cook. But the traditions that they started still carry on, we still bring in trees to our home to decorate and create wreaths for our doors - even if they don't hold quite the same meaning for all. 

In these delightful cards there are representatives of many of these things, I went with mistletoe but we also had holly, in both a decorative pattern (like wrapping paper) and a close up branch complete with vivid knot berries. Christmas trees (too hard to tell if they're pine or spruce!) also featured in two very distinctive styles, and several wreaths! All of the wreaths have been created so differently though - a delicate embroidery on a door, a more textural wreath with possibly crocheted leaves(?), a feature wreath with lovely detached chain stitch flowers, and a wreath featuring a fabulous toadstool! 

I actually have created a couple of wreaths in my time which had little clusters of tiny faux toadstools so I particularly liked this one as a reminder of that. 

The pink front door with the orangey brown brickwork lends a pop of colour to these cards. Red and green do feature quite heavily but these are surprisingly colourful with blue, yellow, orange, red, white, gold and silver. I was envisaging more green I think when I look back at some of the obvious colour themes that have come out of previous months, and with the word 'greenery' in the theme title. 

This has been a really lovely theme to end on and I just wanted to thank everyone again for taking part in this swap. I'll probably say it again in upcoming posts where I look at the whole collection but, for an idea that sparked whilst I was sitting alone in my living room, to suddenly being a whole completed year of artistic pen pals and a collection of fabulous stitched artwork, it's just amazing!! 

Frosted Dew Drops ATCs

I started on the January theme at the end of last year to fill up my embroidery hoop alongside the Festive Greenery cards. This swap theme is Frosted Dew Drops and I had in mind the beautifully jewelled spider webs that are left from the autumn and get encrusted with frozen beads of water as it gets colder. I imagine no self respecting spider will be creating fantastic webs in the windy weather we've been having and, as it's snowed, it's probably too cold for them anyway (I'm not really up to speed with the schedule of spiders) but in the autumn - around October according to a previous spider web themed blog post I made - there are suddenly an amazing collection of webs that pop up in gardens overnight. Most of these will have blown away by the time January comes around but there are a few I have seen in the nooks and crannies of buildings or under benches, which survive and look like they are made of glass with the ice beads and frosted dew that cling to the silken strands. 

I wanted to try and represent the colours of an early morning, but with less grey so I have gone for a slightly blueish background with little hints of sparkle. The top fabric is a lovely spotted pale grey batik (my nod to the grey weather) which matches the silver sparkle in the striped fabric below. I haven't stitched anything onto the top fabric, but have gone over a few of the printed lines underneath just with long straight stitches following the pattern - more to help hold the fabric down than anything. The edge has been neatened with blanket stitch in a light grey to match the fabric above. 

The square batik below has been textured by adding back stitch in a single strand around all of the squares using the same colour thread, so that it blends into the background, and edged with bullion knots. And the slightly mottled blue fabric at the bottom also hasn't had anything added specifically to it, but has been edged with a really shiny ribbon that I had in my stash. It's quite a wide ribbon, with a band of metallic through the centre so it almost acts as another fabric layer. 

The ribbon is a variegated colour so I quite like that each card has a slightly different colouration to it. There is a more grey/yellow section which matches the top fabric and then more of a blue which complements the bottom fabric. 

My spiderweb has been created by initially couching two strands of a black/dark grey metallic embroidery floss with the long diagonal lengths. The thread was pulled through the fabric in four big stitches initially and then a single strand of normal black floss was used to discreetly couch these down and keep them in a straight line. I've stitched the perpendicular stitches around this frame, sort of wrapping the long stitches around the thread and fabric. They aren't measured out so each card is slightly different. 

With the limitations of the depth of the card for postage I couldn't add anything too thick to create my dew drops. I did initially think about french knots using a different colour metallic thread but I thought that would look too fussy. The beads I had in my stash were too small or not quite right so I ended up with these clear sequins. I have stitched them down so that they are tucked underneath the strands of the web to hide the stitches I've made to hold them down, but I'm wondering whether I should have searched harder for my clear thread so that I could stitch some on top of the web as well? Or if I should quickly cheat and use a dab of glue on top of some of them? I might play around with this idea as I can't stitch anything else on now that the backs are on but it's been playing on my mind - and I'm usually very anti-glue with my pieces!

These were probably the quickest Stitchsape cards I've made so far, but I hope they don't look them!! I was going for simple and effective with this theme. 

Introducing Stitchscape Swap 2023

 

We have nearly finished a whole year's worth of textile art cards. I am just waiting on a few more to arrive for the December swap (there are still postal delays holding things up) and once they have been swapped we are completely done! I will put another post up with better photos but above is my collection of cards for the year that I have made and I'm pretty pleased with them. I don't know how many people are joining in with 2023, there were several requests for more information to join and participate at the end of 2022 but we also had a few people who had been making cards either stop near the end or email to say they weren't able to continue. I really hope that we can carry on as I find it really inspiring to see what others can come up with. 

If you are part of an embroidery/textile/stitching group, perhaps you might like to pick a theme/month to join in? You don't have to sign up for the whole year - maybe a theme in your programme would fit and you could make an extra little card to send. Multiple cards can be sent at once so even if you and a friend like to get together for creative projects and wanted to send both of your cards in one envelope to save on postage I am very flexible about how the cards come in and out. I would be interested to know if it's perhaps the postage that might put people off? Would posting less during the year be better? Or doing 3 month's worth at a time? Please do let me know!

For my part I have been advertising the cards and the swap where I can. This year I have a couple of talks booked to give specifically on the swap and what we have been doing, as well as two workshops! One is a private workshop for an embroidery group and one you can book to come onto at Made & Making in Hassocks, near Brighton. The link to the workshop is here for you if you are interested. 

These are the themes for 2023 again for you, I have already made my January ones so I'll try to get cracking on my February Snowdrops later on this week - it might be a weekend job when I've got someone to look after the baby with me so that I can get out the iron and just concentrate (yes I did say get out the iron!!). I'm looking forward to swapping with you all!!

New Year at Scotney Castle

Happy New Year!! Welcome 2023!

It has been a wet and windy start to the year (I'm a Brit, we always open conversation with the weather). Grey and damp and miserable - apart from Monday 2nd January, which was gloriously sunny with blue skies and fluffy white clouds. We ended up going for a walk around Scotney Castle in the afternoon with my sister, two nephews, their aunt and a mad spaniel, which was lovely! 

The most picturesque bit, and possibly the most recognisable part of Scotney, is the old 'castle' at the bottom of the hill which dates back to 1378. It was transformed into a romantic ruin, as part of re-landscaping the garden in the 1830s, by Edward Hussey III when he built the newer house at the top of the hill with its mod-cons and fancy rooms. The old building was becoming dated and cramped with six children running around. You can still walk around some of the rooms in the round corner tower, although they have been closed off for winter now. 

It was getting fairly late in the afternoon (for January time anyway as it is dark at 4.30pm at the moment) as we wandered round. We had intended on going earlier but hadn't realised that it was the last day of their Christmas event and you had to pre-book the carpark - on arrival we were advised to go back an hour later for a chance to get in so went off to have some lunch in a nearby posh pub. Unfortunately for us, we went back an hour and a half later and were advised that we had to wait another half an hour somewhere!! So after all of that sitting in the car waiting (it seemed silly to just go back home at that point) it was rather lovely to eventually be able to get out and stretch our legs. 

These photos don't show quite how busy it was with couples and young families strolling around (although to be fair, most of them had ended up in the café). There were quite a lot of dogs on leads too so we were stopped many times by other dog owners to compare breeds and say hello to all of the furry friends.

It was a nice afternoon though, completed with a Butterscotch Steamer (ordered for the intrigue) and chocolate brownie, and a lovely way to welcome in the new year. Now of course we are back to grey and miserable weather with cloud so thick I can't see the view from our kitchen window. 

We are on the other side of winter now though and heading toward spring! I have planted my Hyacinth and Narcissus bulbs in my pots and topped them with Primroses for some colour on our balcony. I'm just hoping that we don't get a heavy frost or that the bottom of the saddle pots don't get too waterlogged and ruin the bulbs. We shall see in a few months time if my efforts have been worth it!