Angus & Flora 2023 Week Three

 

December 15th:: As I understand it, the Elves are having a mulled cider bath in the slow cooker. What I don't understand, is why the cider is still in the glass bottle?

December 16th:: Angus and Flora are having a tinsel party!! It's an immersive experience a bit like a silent disco but with more rustling and a sinking feeling as you wiggle further into the scratchy shininess.

December 17th:: New friends have been made in the kitchen!

December 18th::  Angus and Flora are Christmas trees! Can you tell? They've made themselves into a woodland with some wrapping paper tubes and green tissue paper. I'm not sure how they get themselves down. 

December 19th:: Busy little bees Angus and Flora have been cataloguing the Christmas presents currently under our tree for family and friends. They are being graded by weight, size, shape and how well they have been wrapped! No pressure. 

December 20th:: The Elves love this game, they bring it with them every year and nag anyone they come across to join in! For once Angus has even been allowed to be the banker!

December 21st:: Angus and Flora are getting ready for a fancy dress party they've been invited to. Angus is wondering whether his Christmas Pudding outfit is a little too tight and Flora's plans of being Captain Underpants have hit a snag - she can't get the pants on!

Angus & Flora 2023 Week Two

December 8th:: Angus and Flora felt that the computer and desk weren't feeling festive enough so have taken it upon themselves to decorate it and make it more jolly. They've used mini lights, tinsel, ribbons and wrapped chocolates....Although Angus appears to be cracking those open already so they may not last until Christmas!!

December 9th:: Fireman Angus is rescuing a good citizen from a burning building (one of those modern ones with big screens on the side) using his high tech fire engine and bubble wand fire fighting gadgets!

December 10th:: Angus and Flora are taking a relaxing bubble bath after their sooty rescue game yesterday. It will be good to get them smelling nice and clean!

December 11th:: Angus and Flora are playing a complicated elf game which at first appears to resemble Pick Up Sticks but is apparently not. (Partially because they aren't real sticks, they are sherbet sticks.) Flora is winning and Angus is miffed. 

December 12th:: The Elves have been invited to a party and are playing Pin the Nose! It's been noses flying everywhere but now it seems Angus might be cheating and peeking!

December 13th:: After cheating in the game yesterday. Angus turned fugitive and became wanted by the Rozzers. Luckily he's been brought safely behind bars by Superflora the Superhero Elf! Thank goodness she's here to keep our hallway safe. 

December 14th:: Angus and Flora have invited some of their friends into a special den they've made, to sit and tell Christmas stories around the Haribo bear campfire. Flora is mid-tale..., let's listen..."and then Rudolph said to the man in the pram, give us a lick of your lollipop..."

October Toadstool Treasures ATCs

 

How gorgeous are these? I love that everyone seems to have been on the same page with the type of toadstool - especially considering how many varieties there are. I know these are possibly the most iconic but it surprises me slightly that no one in the group went down a different route. 

What is different though is the way they have been represented and there's a wonderful selection of embroidery styles and techniques; fabric collage, petite point/red work (not sure there), realistic, cartoon-esque, stylised.... They stand out in every card beautifully and work together amazingly well as a collection. 

The piece above I'm not sure if it's red work or petite point, or neither - either way it's very tiny, intricate stitching with wonderful use of creating pattern to provide shading a focus to areas. Very clever! If you have a better idea please do let me know.

I love these little felted caps with their french knot spots. They really stand out, almost glowing from underneath the dark green trees. I guess they do almost glow in real life actually - especially as they can sometimes have dew drops or condensation on them that gives a slightly more glossy appearance that would catch the light and be quite luminescent. 

This card is wonderful in its simplicity. Two fabrics for the toadstools with just some matching red thread to keep the red caps down, detail in simple straight stitches to create the gills and some black and white stitches down the stalk for texture. It's bold and stands out really nicely from the background. 

This one has a similar feel, although there is more embroidery creating the image with close stitches for the stems, blanket stitches around the two red caps and linking stitches on the brown cap. I can't decide whether these have been done as rows of blanket stitch or wide chain stitches? What do you think?

The fabrics at the bottom of this card are really lovely. Very busy with lots of autumnal patterns that remind me of all of the fallen leaves littering the ground at this time of year. It is busy on the woodland floor, lots of colours from different types of leaf or the odd late flower, some creating little pools where the curled leaf shape catches rainwater or dew - hinted at here with the use of beads that catch the light. 

Choosing the right fabrics can also really make a beautiful image. I love the crinkled fabric for the grasses and the little mottled red/white knitted fabric for the mushroom cards. It's a really sweet depiction and makes me think of Fairy rings the way the perspective curls the toadstools around the tree trunk. 

I don't recall watching a lot of Noddy as a kid. Enough to know about Big Ears and PC Plod, and Noddy's car, but not really what they got up to. I love that the theme for this month has brought up potential memories for this person, I wonder whether it was them who watched it or their children/grandchildren?

Thank you to everyone who participated in this month's swap! 

Layered Butterflies

I am trying to keep a month ahead of the Stitchscape swap this year to help me not get stressed about deadlines and to allow additional time to create more. Some days I don't touch this hoop at all, and even on occasion for a couple of weeks so being ahead of myself really helps out. 

I think as a still fairly new mum, I often find myself saying 'help the future Beth out by doing a little job now', as one of the biggest things I've learnt is to be organised as much as possible and get whatever I can done early (or the day before) so that I'm not panicking and forgetting essentials later on when something else pops up. It's a new mantra that I have on a rolling cycle in my brain on a daily basis. 

So the theme for April this year is Butterfly House and I'm intrigued to see how the others interpret this. I wanted to try something slightly new for me, a kind of hatchet version of stumpwork, and I still have no idea how this is going to turn out but I wanted the butterflies to be three-dimensional and pop out of the card (but be flat enough to post in a normal letter envelope). 

On the day I started I had also sorted through a load of magazines I was going to recycle and came across this page in the National Trust magazine so I ripped it out thinking that it would make an interesting texture for the back of my butterflies. I should think that there are several of you reading this who would have had a better idea than me on how to make these little creatures, but in the end I went with creating a fabric sandwich, trapping a layer of calico as well as the magazine page into my hoop. It wasn't particularly easy but I didn't rip the paper so that was a good start!

As with the Blackbirds in my Morning Chorus cards I played around with a couple of different types of butterfly to create a template, trying to find a pleasingly balanced butterfly shape that was easy to represent in fabric. I have actually backed these fabrics with iron-on vilene to help hold the edges so there are technically four layers  going into these; the paper, calico, vilene and the pretty fabrics themselves. 

The wing fabrics were picked up from the Ardingly quilt show in a scrap bag and I thought they went really nicely together. It would have been too easy to do all four in the same colour so it is more fun to do two of each!

After tacking (with one long stitch per wing to avoid poking too many holes in the paper), I stitched the bottom wings down first using blanket stitch, trying to be as neat and as regular as I could. I quickly discovered that if I pulled the thread too hard, or if it knotted whilst pulling through, the paper at the back would tear so I had to be quite sensitive in my stitching. I had to limit the times I poked the needle through trying to find the right place for the next stitch too as the paper wouldn't recover like the fabric does and I'd end up with a really battered looking butterfly underwing.

Something I don't usually consider is knotting my thread - if you look at the back of all of my Stitchscapes I always knot my thread because it's safer and no one sees it once you've finished the piece but, in this case, because they are fluttering freely from the surface of the card, I can't have ugly knots everywhere! I still knotted the thread but I've hidden them all underneath the top wings, then also discreetly knotted on the back when I'd finished a section and carried the threads through elsewhere to cut it. 

I haven't added too much detail to these butterflies because I am slightly worried about the paper on the back. It would definitely be a technique to work on if I wanted to use it again - I wonder whether you can add vilene to a magazine page to help support it and stop the tearing? Or would the heat required just damage the ink and the paper? Does anyone know?

Of course, the stitching turned out to be the easy part - I then had to cut them out and free them from the hoop!! I don't think I actually breathed a full breath the entire way around the first butterfly I was so intent on not cutting through any of my embroidery threads. There was definitely some sticking-out-tongue-in-concentration action happening.

Happily, they all cut out with no mishaps and are surprisingly strong considering the two sides are attached by not very much fabric at the centre. The calico is completely hidden and the paper at the back looks quite nice actually so I think it was worth it. I think the paper also gives support and shape to the wings - if they had just been made with the fabrics they would be flopping around all over the place. 

These are only the first part of the cards for this theme though - I still have the actual cards to make with the backgrounds and stitching to do before I can think about attaching my little flutteries. My plan is to not stitch through them as such but trap them underneath an embroidered body but we'll see how that goes when I'm ready for them. 

Paper Trees

With the ATC swap that I am hosting this year I have tried to get the themes to match the seasons so that there is lots of topical inspiration around when creating. Following on from my last post about our visit to Sheffield Park and seeing all of the gorgeous, rustling leaves I wanted to get that same feeling in the October cards which have the theme, Autumn Blaze. With the leaves crunching underfoot, they sound quite rustle-y, and I did consider trying to use actual leaves somehow in these cards but decided that it probably wouldn't be lasting as the leaves would disintegrate fairly quickly. 

Instead, I have used papers, trying to get a selection of different textures and colours to create more of an interest. Having considered hand cutting hundreds of little, tiny leaf shapes, I decided instead to take the slightly quicker route of using a hole punch and basically creating paper sequins to stitch down and layer. My only concern is that they might look a little like fish scales? I'm hoping not too much though. 

I have stitched a few single ones part way down the trunks to represent falling leaves, as I had a couple land on me when walking round Sheffield Park, and also a little floor of leaves at the bottom of the card. 

I do really like the fact that the punched circles kind of rustle if you run your hands over them. They are only stitched with one little stitch on one side so they kind of stick up a bit and can be manipulated slightly so there is good fun to be hand with the rustling aspect. One of the papers was also shiny and a little see-through so it is a nice contrast to the heavier handmade papers or the brown and orange sugar papers. 

I know the theme was Autumn Blaze and there is a lot of colour connotation with that but I'm wondering whether I can have too much autumnal colour in one card? I think I'm just going to edge the fabrics that still have visible raw edges, and maybe add some french knots to the leaf litter, but other than that, these are pretty much done!

I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else comes up with for this swap. The September swap is a little late being sent back out to everyone as we have been waiting for cards to come in around various illnesses and postal strikes delaying things!

Little Book of Stitchscapes Vol 5

 

I feel like I really need to get back into the saddle and the swing of things for my little Dotty Textiles business. The to-do list and the wish lists are just endless, and my shop has been coasting along by itself really so I am running low or out of several products that I need to crack on with re-stocking. 

HOWever... I did get my act together a little bit and had a productive evening putting together another little Stitchscape book as I sold out of these a while ago. They are lovely little books (even if I do say so myself) and are stuffed full of photographs of my most recent Stitchscapes; trying to focus on the different techniques I've used and also the different things I've created, like the pebbles and the ATCs that I've been working on this year for the Stitchscape ATC swap so it's not just 'scapes in hoops. 

It's not a big book and I haven't written anything in it as I'm too terrified. I can't tell you how many times I've tried starting to write a book about Stitchscapes and to get down the different sections I would like to include but then I chicken out and nothing happens. So, for now, a picture book will do for me!

There are 20 pages and the quality of the paper (lovely thick card stock!) and the print is gorgeous. They even feel nice to hold, all smooth and silky. 

The colours are very true to the original pieces too which is an achievement I feel. It's tough taking all of the photos myself because I don't have a set area to photograph anything and it's usually in the brightest place I can find at the time of wanting to take the photo. Most images are bad so I have to take about 200 photos of the same thing in different places or with different props grabbed from various rooms around the house to try and get a handful of really nice ones. These photos for example were taken in my pop up photo booth standing on a chest of drawers in my son's nursery with a wood print wrapped board underneath my wooden bed tray, my new favourite mug from the kitchen, a String of Pearls plant from the bathroom and my boyfriend's glasses! 

Hopefully you do get a coffee table vibe after all of this effort?

But, as these are fairly pricey for me to order from the supplier, I've only ordered 10 and, as I usually do, when I next get a bunch printed I will change the photos used and update the book to try and keep it all as up to date as possible. Some photos I've reused over and over (this is the fifth book now) but most are new or not previously used I think. I don't keep any of these books myself so I can't actually reference them and see which photos I've used before. 

If you would like one to grace your table then I have five available in my Etsy shop and five available in my web shop (which seems only fair!) so hopefully you'll be able to track one down. Let me know what you think!