Chartwell

Some time ago now we visited the lovely Chartwell house and gardens. It's the former home of Sir Winston Churchill and his family and is now in the care of the National Trust. I've been meaning to post about it for ages but sadly my blog takes a back seat when things get busy and I've never gotten around to writing information about it to go with my photos. 

We had visited with a friend and luckily enough it was a beautiful Spring day! Not too cold or windy and nice and sunny which was ideal. Baby F could toddle around, although if it were up to him he would just keep going and we would never stop and look at anything. Occasionally though he suddenly stops and you find yourself falling over him in a tangle.

I find the inside of the house slightly strange. With other National Trust properties you expect huge ornate rooms with disapproving ancestors frowning at you down their noses from copious oil paintings hanging on the walls, fading silk wallpaper and fantastically ornate moulded ceilings. Whilst Chartwell is still very grand it is also quite modern looking, not ostentatious at all really and for some reason it stands out in my mind for that. 

With a toddler on the loose there wasn't a lot of standing and reading the room material and we whistled through the rooms searching out the different animals on the Easter trail (he especially enjoyed the stairs) and back out into the garden for an emergency snack. 

The time of year gives the garden the feeling of things awakening. There were lots of bare branches but also still some new shiny colours coming through, leaf buds in a zesty green, tentatively uncurling ferns which always remind me exactly of pistil stitches (french knots on their own sticks), and beautiful red and pink Camelias throwing browning flowers at the people walking underneath. 

The Magnolias have also been especially nice this year - sometimes they can be a bit patchy if it frosts too harshly after they've flowered but I think they've been ok. 

We walked down to Churchill's art studio (which is more than four times the size of my flat - just for him to store his paintings!) and had a chat with the very friendly volunteer who was clicking us in. Personally I don't find all of Churchill's paintings that good, or of interesting subject matter but to be fair we had walked into his private space - perhaps he felt the same way about some of his paintings, I certainly have some pieces of mine stored away that I don't like all that much. I would dearly love to have an area even half the size of his to house my Stitchscapes and store all of my materials in though. 

It's a lovely place to visit if you are in the area. My family collect the fabric patches that the National Trust now sell for their properties so we remembered to collect our badges before we left so that I can stitch them onto our camp blankets - at some point in the distant future. 

Northern Lights ATCs

These cards have not turned out the way I thought they would. In my mind they were a lot more green when finished but I was following the colours of the fabric underneath and it all ended up a lot more orange/pink than anticipated. Which is fine, I don't dislike them but it doesn't quite match where I thought I was going - which I should have realised at the fabric picking stage!

Most of my time on these was spent with the light show part, and I have completely covered the fabric underneath with threads, mixing up the colours in my needle as well to try and get a sense of lots of dancing colours. 

I have seen the Northern Lights myself, but I'll be honest and say I was a bit disappointed. Either it wasn't a particularly good night to see them, or they are pitched to be a tad more exciting than they are.... I don't know. As I recall the colours weren't actually in the sky. It was a white misty stuff that looked like a stray cloud but, if you had your camera settings correctly, the colour appeared all in the photo. Hold tight a moment whilst I look out my photos of the event.....

Please hold.....

Holding....

Ah, here we go!

These photos were taken at about one in the morning in Iceland, in the freezing cold, surrounded by literally hundreds of other freezing cold people all with cameras. Tripping over tripods and getting blinded by accidental camera flashes. It wasn't at all romantic. We had been told on the coach ride over to our location (the middle of nowhere) what settings to put our cameras on so we were all ready to go, but had to wait for about 3 hours before anything appeared. Myself and my friend had given up and gone and sat back in the coach to try and get some feeling back into our limbs when this cry came up all around the coach carpark and people were racing out of their coaches to the ridge where the cameras were set up. Excitedly we joined suit but, as I say, the only colour appeared in the photos and it was underwhelming to say the least. (The orange in the below photo is also light pollution, not a part of the lights themselves.)

Anyway, I digress. The fabric print used was a large scale, slightly abstract, design with lots of colours in and I thought it would work nicely to create different lines and layers in the piece. I've followed the colours (mostly) underneath and worked satin stitches, although did vary the directions of the stitches in some places. Each 'colour' is actually two strands of thread in a slightly different colour which is possibly more visible in the blue/green combination, or a variegated perle thread. I like the effect it creates rather than just being one solid colour each time. 

I've tried to add a little bit of sparkle for pizazz by adding long straight stitches in a metallic thread that shoot through the lights and upward into the sky above. 

The layer underneath has been edged with two strands of coton perle in black couched down with a single strand of a coloured thread so that it stands out and again has that linear look like some of the light streaks are lower and less in one block. 

Tiny french knots have been added to some of the spots of the pattern to add in a little bit of texture but I didn't have enough time left (or the will to do so really) to add a one strand, one twist french knot in every single spot. That's the joy of using a pre-printed fabric, it doesn't matter when you leave sections unstitched. 

A fine cord has been couched to the edge of the layer underneath and at the bottom I've just added little clusters of two strand straight stitch stems in black, then gone over and created a front and back row by changing the colour of additional stems - one row in orange and one in blue. In the front row I've also added an extra line to the coloured stems in metallic thread to bring the sparkle down from the sky. These colours almost glow like neon signs among all of the black here but my intention was to have them almost reflecting the colours above (a bit like when plants are tinged white if in moonlight). 

Two colour french knots have been popped at the bottom of the stems to give them some ground to grow in and I've just left it there!

I've tried mixing up my threads in these cards, I've got stranded Anchor cottons, coton perle threads and metallic threads all jumbled in there together adding slightly different textures and thicknesses. 

Whilst I like the effect that's been achieved, I think if I were to have another crack at them I would try and change the colours a bit - less orange and more blues and greens. Maybe also have less of an 'edge' to the lights and try to stagger the top edge a little bit so that it fades more than just stops. But I don't dislike the cards and that's the main thing! They are certainly very punchy to look at. 

The stitch run down for these ones is short and sweet; satin stitch, straight stitch, couching and french knots.

Creative Workshop Hoops

I had a brilliant workshop at Made & Making recently. It was fully booked which is always something of a compliment - especially as this creative workshop is a repeated one and we've run it several times before. What was especially nice is that two of the ladies in this workshop were also at the previous class I did with the little mini hoops (the 2-5cm ones) and they loved it so much they immediately went home and booked onto the next one!! 

All of the photos in this post are of the work started by the ladies who came, except one who managed to sneak out without my catching her. 

The hardest part of a Stitchscape is starting one so really the morning is spent putting together the fabrics, deciding what the vague scene is and getting that secured down. Then, after lunch we can sit and start on the embroidery, learning new stitches and thinking about thread colours. I would love to do a retreat where you can spend a couple of days stitching because really that's what you need to really feel like you're on the way with the textures. 

A creative workshop allows for one on one tutoring on how to make the embroidery stitches and because everyone makes something completely different, often I end up teaching different ones to different people. The lady above hadn't done any embroidery and had a practice piece of calico so for her it was about learning and practising a couple of stitches over and over - she did these gorgeous blanket stitch trees which are really lovely! Great fabric choice too. 

Everybody is sent home with a print out of ideas on layering and types of stitches for certain patterns of fabrics, as well as diagrams with my own wording of how to make my favourite stitches, and there is also my website with tutorials on how to finish pieces or help with some of the more difficult stitches. I'm adding to these when I can to build up a really good help section to back up my workshop - but also one that everyone else can use as well, whether they're just interested or working on a kit. 

In this class bullion knots were a big learning curve (they usually are), and this lady with her lovely lace layers had also never embroidered before but made lots of fabulous bullion knots after just one tutorial! I really like the different shapes and stitches with the grey polka dot - it's a good example of the different things you can do with polka dot fabrics. In this case she's added extra spots in dark brown between the spots in that central semicircle and then on either side has made rows of diagonal back stitch which makes it look like something is pouring down the sides into the middle. 

Sometimes the workshops aren't so much about making lots of obvious progress but actually talking through ideas and being given the confidence to have a go. Things are unpicked and started again and that's ok - when you're learning you can't always expect to do everything right all of the time. Being in a wonderfully creative environment, like the Made & Making studio, surrounded by like minded creative people all having a natter about this, that and everything in-between is often enough of a relaxing day to feel inspired when you get home. 

Although most of the Stitchscapes end up being landscape based, as my own usually are, occasionally there are some which end up slightly more abstract because that's where the stitching has taken them and that's cool too! This piece started out inspired by water lilies and lily ponds so the woven wheel stitches are emulating the lilies, but it's giving an overall sense rather than specifically looking at a lily pond with a bank etc. The colours in this are lovely. 

And this one I think is the first ever train to be put into a Stitchscape! Stitching by yourself is very mindful, but stitching with others can spark all kinds of ideas and this piece is a prime example as the fabric layer with the arches on had been included because the lady loved it, but as we were talking about what it could be, someone else peeped over her shoulder and suggested that it could be a viaduct - which led to it being a viaduct for a train track! The train itself was then created with satin stitch and with little french knot puffs of smoke (my idea) - completely not something that had been intended when the lady had initially put the fabrics together but works so perfectly! A team effort. 

If you haven't signed up to come along to a workshop with me then definitely have a think about it - it's a nice day out if nothing else!

Growing a Harvest

 

I started designing this kit in September last year - but this is actually the second hoop because if you look back on that post introducing the idea of this kit, there are less fabrics in it!

I got a few layers in on the first draft and decided that it wasn't working, so went back to my stash and pulled out even more fabrics to add - making this kit even more complicated than I had initially planned. 

I wanted to design something that was a bit bigger - the next stage if you like from the current kits I have. Most of them are made in a 15cm hoop but this one is being done in a 20cm hoop and it is loosely based on the first ever kit I designed, Summer Sweet! I don't currently have a summery kit in my range really and it has been missing so it will be interesting to see how this one goes. 

I've been going a bit all over the place stitching these layers as I'm trying to balance colours and not go completely crazy with the thread colours - it does have to be fairly affordable! At the moment each layer is almost it's own entity and own project. It's felt a bit like making one of those monthly magazine quilts where you have a square a month to stitch and put together. Each layer has it's own set of stitches which can take quite a long time, but then when you see it next to the next layer, the story of the whole landscape builds up (like putting the quilt blocks together at the end). 

I'm afraid it hasn't been happening very fast so I've been forcing myself to take it everywhere with me in a box with the book to write down all of the stitch information, ruler to make sure I'm measuring how much thread is used and every thread I have or want to use in the kit. I'm slightly dreading getting to the end and having to write up the instructions as they were starting to get a bit scribbly with lines everywhere. It'll be a big kit! Perhaps this one I'll have to print in A4 rather than A5, and name it the BIG kit!

I like how it's going though, it's got three types of thread in so far; stranded cotton embroidery thread, tapisserie yarn (the woolly looking stuff) and coton a broder which is new to me but seems to be a thinner cotton perle with less of an obvious twist to it. There's a gorgeous tiny ric rac and a really nice cotton lace as well as two different colours of beads so it's got a lot going on. 

just the stems at the bottom to finish off I think and then it's there.