Artful Homemade Quilts Have A Way

[freedombecki]

Progress last night was pretty slow. That's what I get for being a Chatty Cathy doll on pms sometimes! Anyway, here's what little progress I made yesterday, front and back plus the comparison of the real butterfly in picture form:

 

[koshergrl]

Oooh....beautiful!

 

[koshergrl]

I'm still plodding away on the swan pillow cases...I have almost finished the edging on one...have started on the other one..but I still have 3+ swans to go...I need more time more time!!!

I am going to crochet a ruffle/edging for my daughter's pillow, the cross stitch that I finished..like...last year...lol. I have it figured out how...I'm going to crochet the edging, then sandwich it in and sew it just like I would have done the cloth ruffle...I should have that done for Christmas, and she should be surprised.

Gotta get cracking on some fabric birds now...

 

[freedombecki]

I'm still plodding away on the swan pillow cases...I have almost finished the edging on one...have started on the other one..but I still have 3+ swans to go...I need more time more time!!!

I am going to crochet a ruffle/edging for my daughter's pillow, the cross stitch that I finished..like...last year...lol. I have it figured out how...I'm going to crochet the edging, then sandwich it in and sew it just like I would have done the cloth ruffle...I should have that done for Christmas, and she should be surprised.

Gotta get cracking on some fabric birds now...

That's totally wonderful, koshergrl.

 

[Bloodrock44]

Mrs. Blood has been knitting like the energizer bunny every spare moment since she got home from school Tuesday (she's a first grade teacher). She bought another 20 skeins of yarn Wednesday. I'm treading lightly as she has threatened to teach me to knit. It would probably be easier for her to rebuild the great wall of China before Christmas.

 

[freedombecki]

Mrs. B is very dedicated! Hope she sells out at the school needs sale.

Just came to post some progress photos. One yesterday morning, I picked up the cross stitch and did the blue flower and orange bud. Does it ever look different from the first one in which it was just x-stitched as a blob. I'm just now realizing that there are a couple of companies that just print out blocks, but they have zero instructions. It's a hard way to complete something, I'll tell you!

1. Progress on the Blue Morpho butterfly

2. Progress on the Yellow Ribbon boquet/nosegay

3. The block that wasn't completed and which had no instructions whatever​

 

[Sunshine]

Mrs. B is very dedicated! Hope she sells out at the school needs sale.

Just came to post some progress photos. One yesterday morning, I picked up the cross stitch and did the blue flower and orange bud. Does it ever look different from the first one in which it was just x-stitched as a blob. I'm just now realizing that there are a couple of companies that just print out blocks, but they have zero instructions. It's a hard way to complete something, I'll tell you!

1. Progress on the Blue Morpho butterfly

2. Progress on the Yellow Ribbon boquet/nosegay

3. The block that wasn't completed and which had no instructions whatever​

You're right. And when I get those, I do a monochromatic. Or two colors, like on the dresser scarves I did in gold and brown.

 

[freedombecki]

Mrs. B is very dedicated! Hope she sells out at the school needs sale.

Just came to post some progress photos. One yesterday morning, I picked up the cross stitch and did the blue flower and orange bud. Does it ever look different from the first one in which it was just x-stitched as a blob. I'm just now realizing that there are a couple of companies that just print out blocks, but they have zero instructions. It's a hard way to complete something, I'll tell you!

1. Progress on the Blue Morpho butterfly

2. Progress on the Yellow Ribbon boquet/nosegay

3. The block that wasn't completed and which had no instructions whatever​

You're right. And when I get those, I do a monochromatic. Or two colors, like on the dresser scarves I did in gold and brown.

Simplification is sounding better and better!

I've been checking eBay and Amazon for books titled "1001 embroidery patterns" and "550, 501, 500 (etc.) cross stitch embroidery" books. Counted cross stitch by far has the most tomes out there, and since last summer, I've accrued about a dozen or more dollar or two dollar books, some of which are nice, and a couple by men authors. I've been trolling their indexes for roses and florals, but I can't find a single rose exactly like the ones on the white fabric with blue X-stitches sans instruction. But I've been getting some good and different ideas from different authors. I swear, a few of them have such a style they're like painters, and you can tell their works from other authors. Well, thread is just an artistic media, so those who create stitches in their own school of mind can be quite specifically similar to others by the same person and completely different from others. So, I'm just trying to produce something that can get past my bad usage of printer, which yields too light or okay images for reasons I'm not too certain of. On the rose bud, (if that's what it is), the light green was way too light, so I added dark straight stitches outside which salvaged it as far as the printer is concerned. I wasn't planning on thinking so much.

​

 

[freedombecki]

The eighth butterfly of a set of 12 I bought months ago is done.

This is the last "coloration" I will do in the set. It takes three times as long plus down time! Below the Blue morpho block is some that were done earlier. It takes quite a bit of time just to do one block--two days if I work 8 hours a day, and the Blue Morpho coloration block took several extra days, just because doing something new takes a little more thought, especially when adding design to someone else's design. The majority of the Blue Morpho Butterflies I've seen pictures of, there is some kind of black border all the way around. It is minimized on some of the butterflies, but usually, a little is still there. One butterfly can have 50 different looks, depending on whether in sunlight or shadow, and its angle. If it's flying, the brown underside interplays with the blue on top, and they say it's stunning to watch them flit about when seen. For anyone who loves butterflies, we have a Lepidoptera thread at USMB, and it can be visited by clicking on this link: http://www.usmessageboard.com/the-outdoors/175431-lepidoptera-lovers-butterfly-kisses.html

So the rest will be done as shown in different color schemas, hopefully.

 

[koshergrl]

Beautiful!

 

[freedombecki]

Beautiful!

Thanks, koshergrl! Glad it's done. Now I can move on and finish something else.

 

[freedombecki]

I thought it'd be fun to visit You Tube and look into some new embroidery stitches. I learned to do a raised stem stitch that is done around foundation stitches across a small space. I wasn't sure what I was doing, but I found a way to use the stitch, which was to perhaps do the center on a small sunflower made up of lazy daisy stitches that I saw some time ago on one of Koshergrl's stitcheries and decided to do. Here's the you tube if you want good instruction on how to do it (I wasn't sure of what I was doing the whole time, but I liked what resulted).

[ame=http://youtu.be/7sn10YPHxRQ]Raised Stem Stitch Band - YouTube[/ame]

I will show my work later. Managed attachments is not working right now for some reason. I better go clean house with my erasure software. BBL.

 

[freedombecki]

Well, hopefully it will work now! Here's my little bit of work done to use what I learned on the video about raised work in embroidery: The center of the sunflower is around the threads that are grouped in ladder formation, and only at the sides and bottom are the threads attached with one stitch around the outside, like what Mary Corbet did around the outside on one of her videos (I also watched others made by her on other types of raised work, raised buttonhole rings a bell, so I'm not sure what I'm doing, like I said above before edit or not. Anyway, fwiw, here's the experiment on the sunflower center, and I'm really loving it:

​

If that's not clear enough, I'll leave a version I enlarged at home on my Paint software that came with my computer, and it's below, Just click on the thumbnail, and it becomes a larger picture in a new tab on your computer if you have it set up that way:​

 

[freedombecki]

Scan one Two plans

Scan 2 circle fail

Scan 3 circle pass

 

[koshergrl]

Well, hopefully it will work now! Here's my little bit of work done to use what I learned on the video about raised work in embroidery: The center of the sunflower is around the threads that are grouped in ladder formation, and only at the sides and bottom are the threads attached with one stitch around the outside, like what Mary Corbet did around the outside on one of her videos (I also watched others made by her on other types of raised work, raised buttonhole rings a bell, so I'm not sure what I'm doing, like I said above before edit or not. Anyway, fwiw, here's the experiment on the sunflower center, and I'm really loving it:

If that's not clear enough, I'll leave a version I enlarged at home on my Paint software that came with my computer, and it's below, Just click on the thumbnail, and it becomes a larger picture in a new tab on your computer if you have it set up that way:​

That is super cool..what is the stitch called?

I love watching embroidery youtube videos, how sick is that, lol!

 

[koshergrl]

and in fact I have a huge tome on the history of embroidery! AND I read it!

 

[freedombecki]

Well, hopefully it will work now! Here's my little bit of work done to use what I learned on the video about raised work in embroidery: The center of the sunflower is around the threads that are grouped in ladder formation, and only at the sides and bottom are the threads attached with one stitch around the outside, like what Mary Corbet did around the outside on one of her videos (I also watched others made by her on other types of raised work, raised buttonhole rings a bell, so I'm not sure what I'm doing, like I said above before edit or not. Anyway, fwiw, here's the experiment on the sunflower center, and I'm really loving it:

If that's not clear enough, I'll leave a version I enlarged at home on my Paint software that came with my computer, and it's below, Just click on the thumbnail, and it becomes a larger picture in a new tab on your computer if you have it set up that way:​

That is super cool..what is the stitch called?

I love watching embroidery youtube videos, how sick is that, lol!

Oops! Took a stitch break! The video calls it the "Raised Stem Stitch. I noticed when I looped the loops with brown, they looked like little seeds. I just played on it, keeping the work a little looser than taught, but not too loose. I watched 3 or 4 videos on different kinds of raised work. I may have picked up a different kind of stitch from the one on the raised buttonhole stitch going in the opposite way. Also, I shaped the "ladder steps" to conform with the weirdo circle that came about when I did my inexacting lazy daisy stitches. I figure nature allows bugs to bite, causing little dips here and there on the finished flower, some missing petals, etc. So if your work on a flower is a tad inexact, you're doing exactly what nature does. Perfection is the plan. What we see when God makes a flower is what the imperfect world does to his perfect plan. We live in a not perfect world.

*sigh*

/country philosopher

Let's see if I can kind of replicate a little in center of what the plan may have been, enlarged an unknown amount of times:

_____​

_________​

A______________​

_______________​

_______________​

B______________​

___________​

_____​

​

I started wrapping 4 threads at points A to B first and went down and back up.​

Then I caught the thread above line A and worked my way to the thread below B and back up again., etc., as space allowed.​

The video didn't have to deal with changes in width. I just put stitches through the cloth at the points where necessity called for it to keep it round.​

​

 

[koshergrl]

Awesome!

Raised Stem Stitch Video Tutorial ? Needle?nThread.com

 

[freedombecki]

Awesome!

Raised Stem Stitch Video Tutorial ? Needle?nThread.com

It looks like a caterpillar! And I figured out why mine look like seeds! Doh! I sewed the circles upside-down, putting the covered threads beneath the little circlets that appear like miniature brown sunflower seeds.

But instead of a fail, I got a sunflower I truly loved, even though it is so miniature. It's serendipity I guess!

Oh, and I put the last stitch on the sunflower-centered color wheel lazy dazy corner on the corner of my bird-quilt-to-someday-be-when-I-have-time! The corner took well over 8 hours, though.

Here's Sunflower Color Wheel: (pattern first scan, first trial, second scan)

 

[Sunshine]

An easier way to alter jeans:

DIY: Hem Jeans Fast & Easy |do it yourself divas

Unbelievable.