Needlequest November - Stumpwork

Here we are at the beginning of a new month for the Needlequest - the second to last one.  This month's theme is stumpwork.  A few years ago I wrote an introductory article to stumpwork (and ribbon embroidery) with some suggestions on how to get going etc, so some readers may like to (re)view that.

Stumpwork is terrific and is a favourite with many stitchers - just to look at and admire, if not to have a go at themselves.  However, this month's challenge is try it out for yourself.  How?  Well, why not have a go at one or two of the tutorials for stumpwork elements on Sew in Love?  I've tried to keep the materials needed just to things you'll already own - cotton threads, a bit of felt and maybe some beads in most cases, so they may be a good place to start.  You can, no doubt find some elsewhere too, if you have a good poke around on-line, in magazines and in books.  Your local library may be able to come up with something that will help you as well.

As with most styles, I suggest starting small and, if at all possible, with a entry level kit.  The advantages of a kit are manifold, but just take supplies as one.  Many keen stitchers have a good supply of fabrics, needles and cotton threads, but not necessary much in the way of beads, metallics, wires and so on.  A kit can solve this problem by providing you with everything you need for that design without you needing to go out and buy a whole pack of something you may never use again.  Also, kits often have good, clear instructions.  I learned a few good techniques using five of the old DMC kits, now long since deleted.  (If you're reading this, 'Emma Brodery' the DMC threads' blogger, suggest some new ones!  People want to learn raised work and, whilst they won't fly off the shelves like cross stitch kits would, I'm certain there is a market for them.)  Ditto (including the bits in brackets, just aimed elsewhere) for the old RSN kits, where the dog rose you can see above came from, and from which I learned the technique for my needlelace strawberry tutorial.

Originally, I had planned to work the Colleshill Collection butterfly and sunflower kit I have in stock for this month's NQ, but I really don't want three fair sized projects on the go at once.  It just gets too much, esp. when one other project is time sensitive.

So, in order to keep thins simpler, these oranges are the sort of thing I plan to do this month.  I've done a fair amount of wiring things before, but I want to have a go at using my paper/cotton moulds to make oranges etc.  I've had the things in stock for a long time, but have never got around to trying them out.  I don't think I'll do as many as five and probably not all the same size, (as I have three different sizes of paper/cotton balls on hand), but we'll see how it goes and how quick they are to work.  I have some ideas that I may want to use them for later on.  Kits/designs-for-sale sorts of ideas.

BTW, this is from Kay Dennis' "Beginners' Guide to Stumpwork"

I hope I can use some of these lovely coton à broder #16 shades that came this morning for my sample.  I got them on e-bay UK and was thrilled to find these 11 shades that I hadn't come across in this gauge before.  The two orange shades, and maybe the greens and even the yellow, may just come in handy this month.

What wonderful retail therapy stash shopping is!  20 days to the Harrogate show.....

November is also 'Art Every Day Month' as hosted by Leah Piken Kolidas, the lady who also hosts the 'Creative Every Day' challenge.  I'd forgotten all about it until I saw her post in my feedly earlier on.  Last year I was all gung-ho to join in and found it went like a complete damp squib for me, so I hope I can do better this year.  My first day's participation will be to relax with a little on my cross stitch later on, but I hope that I can revitalise my art blog during this month too and get some paper-based work done too.  I'll let you know if and when there's anything to see over there.

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2014

Tutorial - simple stumpwork face

Better late than never, and I hope you find it worth waiting for...

Today's tutorial is to create a simple, whimsical raised work face.  I don't often do this sort of 'cartoon' look, so it was an interesting challenge for me to learn too!

I hope you enjoy it and will have a go at making your own cute little face embroidery and will leave a comment with a link to a photo of it.=)

First of all, this piece was worked largely from one of the, sadly, deleted Coats 'Card It' kits.  Here are the contents of that kit and, in the second photo, the changes I made to the colouring of the girl's face.  This was to be a little congratulations card for my niece who got her good GSCE results last Thursday and she isn't a blue-eyed blonde, so I changed to brown thread and beads to match her more closely.  (GCSEs are the national exams all English, Welsh and Northern Irish youngsters sit at age 16.)

Of course, you can do that with the skin tone as well.  So, if you wanted to work an Oriental, Indian or black face, you'd simply select the correct shade of brown for the skin fabric and browns and black for the hair and eyes.

Mount your main background fabric into a small hoop.  I used one just 10cm/4 inches in diameter.

Cut a 5cm/2inch circle from the contrasting fabric you plan to put behind the face and a 4cm/1½5inch circle from your face fabric.  As you can see here, the kit used evenweave fabrics for all three pieces, but I don't see any reason why plainweaves won't work just as well.

Attach the contrasting fabric to the main fabric using random straight stitches and a co-ordinating thread.

Of course, this stage is optional as you don't have to have this contrast trim at all.

Now we move on to creating the head.  Above are the instructional diagrams from the kit (which I thought were pretty good).

Using a matching sewing cotton, stitch a line of running stitches all around the face fabric circle about ½cm/just over ¼ inch from the edge.  Make sure that you secure the thread well at the start with a knot.

Pull the thread up tight and, after having inserted a tiny bit of cotton wool or toy stuffing type material, secure the  back well.  Be careful not to put very much stuffing in, or else you could be dealing with an unnatural protruding face which will be hard to shape later on.

Using small stab stitches and a matching sewing thread, attach the stuffed face to the backing.  Where you position it in the circle will depend on whether or not you want to put some lettering underneath and/or something on the head - a hat or, in this case, a crown.

When you've been all around the edge of the face, this is what it should look like.  Don't worry if it's a little uneven.  You can probably shape anything too odd looking with your fingers and/or a few extra stitches.

Next are the eyes.  Take a beading needle and some matching sewing or embroidery thread and attach seed beads about a third of the way down the face.  Eyes are about half way down a real face, but you may not want all that room above this for this cartoon-style face, especially if you want to add some type of headgear.  If not, place them a tiny bit further down and bring the front hair down further too.

Try to make sure the beads sit well, (one of mine is a little skew...), and pull the thread quite tightly so that the beads pull the face in a little and give it more shape.

Using the same kind of well-pulled stitching, put in a mouth outline using small running and back stitches.

Take care not to pull too tight for either of these stages.  You want to aim to create a little realism in the shape, not to have steep dips - or break the thread!

Now is time to start on the hair section.  There's a lot of room for variety here, so experiment a little and use your imagination.  Afro hair could be created with thicker threads, perhaps pearl cottons which have a good bit of twist and/or French knots.  Here, long, straight stitches using three strands of regular floss were used.

Make sure you cover in the sides well by putting some stitches along the side of the head.

When you've more or less finished, have a good look at the face and see what needs to be adjusted.

I felt the the hairline at the left hand forehead part was a little too angular and my girl looked a bit pale.  So, I put in some more stitches for the hair and, in proper womanly style - painted in her cheeks with a tiny bit of blusher on a small eyeshadow brush!!  Apart from the bead that doesn't sit well (and makes her look cross-eyed - you could even do that on purpose, if you wanted to!), below is the finished face:

This kit was for a head with a crown on and a small piece of pink felt came with it to create that.  I drew out a crown shape on the small square provided using the template in the instructions as a rough guide.

If you want to create a hat, you can use much the same method and cut the shape out of any suitable material: felt, leather, some low- or non-fray fabric, or even a more delicate fabric that you've stabilised by putting some iron-on interfacing or Bondaweb on the back of.

Stitch down the headgear shape using whatever colour and type of thread seem to best meet your requirements and with a size and quantity of straight stitches that you think will fit in with the look you want to create.

Add in some beads and trims as you like.  On the crown, there were six beads to be spaced out along the bottom, which also removed the need to stitch down the bottom edge of the crown shape.  If you do want to stitch down the lower edge of your headgear, take care not to pull too tight or the hat will look like it's squashing the head rather!

Each point of the crown had a start sequin with a bead on top too.  Come up though both then go back down under the bead, but back through the sequin hole to secure the whole trim.

Above is the finished face with crown and below, complete with some lettering (which would have been better done in a darker shade!!) and mounted in a small, circular aperture greetings card blank.

What do you think?  Could you manage to have a go at that?  It only takes about 60-90 minutes to complete, so may be the perfect project for a 'me time' evening.=)

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2014

Ring Bearer Cushion/Pillow - completed project and the wedding!

Here's the finished embroidery still in the hoop.

Below is a close up of the lower leaf section, (about the only close up shot that came out well!!!)

The finished item from various angles:

Worked in DMC and Anchor stranded cottons, and Mill Hill petite seed beads.

You may have noticed that the first, in the hoop pictures didn't feature any tiny dewdrop beads.  Well, there's a story behind that!  When the stitchery was finished, I decided that it didn't need any other trims and decided just to make it up without beading etc.  However....

When I was pressing the flatwork from behind, the silk went all puckery and odd.  I knew it was nothing to do with the backing or the iron being too hot, but I didn't know how to solve it.  So, I tried steaming it with the iron.  That's when our delightful and rather ancient steam iron decided to spew out jets of rusty water all over my precious embroidery!  You can imagine the howl of horror I let out!  I'm glad Sir was in the States at an academic conference at the time as I may otherwise have wasted time taking it to show him the disaster.  As it was, I ran straight to the bathroom washbasin to rinse out as many of the marks as I possibly could under the cold tap.  I was more relieved than I can tell you that the vast majority of them came straight out.  Phew!

Next I pressed what I could of the un-embroidered areas with the iron on cool (and steam OFF!) and then put the whole thing back in it's original hoop and set it in front of my study fan heater to dry again.  Not only did it dry nicely, but it also pulled out all those original funny puckers!!  I was left with one or two light brown marks that most people wouldn't have noticed, but that weren't good enough for me.  So, I got out the petite seed beads and put one on top of each tiny mark!  I added a few more in certain unmarked areas to even things up a bit.

I won't try your patience with all the hassles incurred whilst putting it together, I'll only say that I had neither time, desire nor inclination to add the braids I'd made.  It really didn't add anything to the finished product and I was feeling a spot on the stressed side by this time.  Anyway, into a Tesco zip-lock freezer bag and then into a gift box it went, ready to hand over to the happy couple.=)

When I'd managed to calm fully down, I felt quite proud of my work and although one or two of the friends I told the near miss story to said, 'You shouldn't tell people that', I realised I wasn't only enjoying having a tale to tell, I was also rather proud of having done a good rescue job.=) LOL!

Here's the piece 'in action':

And here's the happy couple after the ceremony posing for their promised photo with their gift.=)

I really did learn huge amounts from this project.  As usual, that was more what not to do next time than anything, but it was a good learning process, if a little tense at times!

Now then, what's next up....?

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2014

Ring Cushion - moving towards completion

Of course, the whole cushion is already finished and handed over as the wedding is tomorrow at noon, but there are still so many photos etc, that I've decided to split the last stages in to two posts.

The first thing to do was to complete the smaller plant elements, leaf veins and stems that were left over from the stage you saw last weekend.  This is the first 'attempt' at it, but the pink main stems for the evening primroses, whilst they looked passable on the left hand side, were really wishy-washy on the right and were lost amongst the brighter herb robert stems.  So, my next move was to replace them with something darker and more easy to distinguish among a mass of stems.  I used one strand each of a green and a brown - the only part of the project worked in two strands.  Here's the result, complete with my dummy yellow paper butterfly.

Moving on now to the creation of the brimstone butterfly (in keeping with the yellow theme of the flowers for the ceremony etc).  After a false start trying to work some wings directly onto the yellow silk fabric that I used for the cushion back with some 34 gauge beading wire and some Pipers Silk floss, I decided to try them on a piece of fine cotton lawn, some white paper covered 30 gauge wire and good old stranded cotton instead.  I needed the fabric to be yellow all through, so as to avoid the all too common white edges that can be seen on some wired stumpwork pieces.  I remembered that my silk dyes could also be used on cotton, so I mixed together my warm and cool yellow shades to get something that would match well and soaked the fabric well with it.  Once it was dry, the whole thing was dyed through and I could attach the wires as you can see here.  The shapes were taken from Jane Nicholas' latest book, 'Stumpwork Butterflies and Moths', but scaled down a tiny bit.  (The body area I created myself with simple padded satin stitch and a few straight stitches.)

Here you can see the next stage, the filling in of the embroidery of the wings.  You can see that I added a little grey on the inner edge to try and make it as realistic as possible.  I carried this all the way through to the edging and that left me with a slight colour mismatch problem along the inner edge as you can see in this next shot:

Not a major problem though.  I found a silver gel pen that was just right for colouring in the yellow edges that were sticking through the grey and eliminated that problem altogether.=)  Here's the finished butterfly in position on the piece:

What about the whole of the finished piece?  Look out for that next week!=)

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2014

Stumpwork ladybird picture re-work

This one took a lot more time than I'd expected and threw up one or two more challenges than I'd thought it would as well.

The first challenge, really, was colour choice.  It's at times like this when you realise just how much difference there truly is between the DMC and Anchor colour ranges.  The original kit was worked in the DMC threads that came with it, but my re-work was in the Anchor threads that I normally use.  The greens were totally different - there wasn't even a close match for one of them, and one of the purplish reds was also missing from the Anchor collection.  Of course, the other way around will be true as well - certain Anchor shades won't be available in the DMC range.  I even considered starting a DMC thread collection, but not for long.  I have nowhere to store a second range of stranded cottons, I don't have the needed £300-400 to buy it and, frankly, I'm not a specialist.  If I were someone like Trish Burr, I would consider it a professional necessity, but as I'm just little ol' me, I'll have to make do.

Anyway, I made the mistake of trying to match the colours too much to the originals and less to each other, so I'm not sure how I like the results at times!!

Here, although the contrast is not good in photography, you might be able to see that I cut the lightest shade out of the blackberries.  I thought about real berries and felt that the shade I'd matched up from the old piece really didn't occur.  As for the darkness of some of the pictures here, the lack of daylight is partly to blame - it didn't seem to get fully light enough to take good shots for days on end!

Above is the almost finished piece before I stitched the wings, and below you can see why you should avoid stitching detached elements on just plain old white/cream fabric unless the edges are to be that sort of colour.  Match up wherever you can!  It's not so bad when the edging is buttonhole, but just plain overcasting almost always leaves one with this problem:

I really hate seeing those white edges and so I seriously considered re-stitching the wings onto red fabric, but decided that, before I started that, I'd see if I could rescue the situation with a good, red pen.

As you can see, it worked and, after giving the wings enough time for the ink to dry thoroughly (you don't want red smears on your background fabric!), I attached them in the usual way and here's the end result:

Here he is again, from a different angle and with the back two sets of legs re-stitched as the first attempt was rather too short!

So, that's it for the old DMC stumpwork designs.  There was a sixth one, but I never bought it as I didn't really like the design.  The next step is to stretch them all onto those cardboard squares I showed you a couple of weeks ago and then find some way of displaying them.

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2014