A nice thing about a new hobby...

...is that it introduces a whole new realm of Christmas surprises.

The resident TechnoMage normally moans about my sewing (mainly because of the "tails" of bits of wool that he keeps finding round the house) so I was surprised to find two very good needlework-related pressies from him on Christmas Day.



The ruler is designed to be filled with something like a picture or a piece of embroidery. And the neat little thread holder will be just the ticket for carrying lots of colours around without needing to take a whole bag of thread.

Rather than give each other a main present, we always come up with an assortment of perhaps 10 smaller things (partly to minimise the risk of all falling flat). They are categorised under any of around 20 headings such as "DVD", "toy or game", "idea/make it yourself", "freebie", "something silly" or "measuring device" (new category introduced this year to cater for the cheapo-but-surprisingly-decent breathalyser I bought him from ebay and continued now with a wireless rain gauge and a wind meter from me to him and a rather interesting usb thermometer from him to me - it plots the change in temperature over time).

With the measuring device category already allocated, the ruler is classed "something to make" and the organiser could have been a new category of "being organised" but is, I'm told, a new category of "craft".

These two gifts even led to the "freebie" category being filled, as the ebay seller involved also sent a decent pen advertising her website, Marie's cross stitch.co.uk.

Thank goodness for scrap bits of fabric...

My next cushion (in parallel with finishing the 32-year-old abandoned one) is probably going to be based on the stepped pattern from the 1970s pattern book...



in colours from my favourite 'sludge' colour of Kaffe Fassett's paperweight fabric....



But first I have to work out suitable dimensions of the step. I decided on the number of stitches for the steps with the idea of boxes a little bigger than the ones in the pattern book, and to use five rows for the steps themselves. and launched straight into a practice piece on some scrap fabric, using colours I'd got plenty of.



Glad I did that instead of starting on the cushion, as it turns out I've miscalculated. Not sure whether this has anything to do with the book using double-thread canvas or is purely down to me not thinking it through properly.

The squares haven't all ended up the sizes I wanted (or as squares come to that!). I'll continue with this scrap anyway to get the feel for how the steps fit together but think I'll also have to get the graph paper out to work out where I went wrong!

Puzzled by indigo - part 1

I've always loved rainbows and had dozens of pictures of them on my wall as a student. But I've never given much thought to their colours. I can chant the Richard Of York Gained Battle In Vain thing to get the red-orange-yellow-green-blue-indigo-violet sequence right, but have always been a bit vague about exactly how blue differs from indigo and how close that is to violet - they all seem a bit too close together compared with the other colours in the spectrum.

Now that I've got hundreds of lovely colours of tapestry wool...


I want to work out which colours make up a rainbow and so thought it was about time I got it sussed.

Turns out I'm not the only one who's troubled by indigo, eg there's a good discussion here about the topic. It looks like I'm going to have to do some more reading to find the RGB/hexadecimal values for my perfect six or seven banded rainbow - and then to translate those into wool colours. Think this minor puzzle is going to turn into a bit of a saga...

Found the culprit

Think I've sussed why I originally abandoned my brown and green cushion cover. I'd miscounted and so a green square was a stitch out - I suspect that I couldn't be bothered at the time working out what was wrong and gave up in a huff.

But filled with new enthusiasm, the mistake has been remedied with the removal of the (now very wavy) piece of wool and I'm now taking much more care. It's not as if it's a difficult counting exercise - there are only 9 stitches in each part of the outer squares...

Delving in the diary cupboard

On a whim last night I dug out my 1976-1977 school year diary to see if I'd recorded the start of the cushion I've now resumed. Not only did I write about starting it (and doing three more squares that week), but it turns out I also bought the materials and pattern book that same day, spending £3.90. I was amused to see that I remarked then about the original 24p price tag for the pattern book - just like a did in my previous post this week! I love the brown ink I used throughout that year! (I'm using purple Parker cartridges in my fountain pen at present - they're good too).



I must have been quite flush that day - or else my Mum was being very generous - as I also got a very wonderful poster of the late Pete Duel of the TV western show, Alias Smith & Jones.



By strange chance, I was talking about that very poster yesterday morning in the car on the way back from the shops. I've still got it, rolled up and tucked away in the corner of my study and I've been thinking of selling it so that it can find a home where it will be properly admired. I'd dug out all my AS&J memorabilia a few years ago, sold one of the posters and supplied scans/photos of everything to the excellent Alias Smith & Jones Collection site/message board - this poster has been lurking in the corner ever since, which seems rather a waste.

70s inspiration

As requested by Knit Nurse, here are some pics from inside the 1970s pattern booklet (plus the rear cover).



As well as patterns it gives a few ideas on how to use them.



Here are a few of the 28 patterns. (I find it quite hard to decide which I like best, as I'm always swayed by whether I like the colours they used!)









I may in time do this one



but for now I've enough brown and green to be going on with in completing the 1977 cushion cover.

In the meantime it's given me an idea for my next colourful cushion cover, which is to be a stitch sampler so I can learn some filling stitches. I was going to just do 25 square boxes, each in different colours &/or patterns, but I now like the idea of adapting this, with bigger squares to give me a bit more room to work in. I'll try it out on a scrap of fabric in the next few days to get the dimensions right.

The booklet's details are: Canvas Embroidery Patterns, published by Coats Sewing Group, book number 1198, 64 pages, article number H 1198-D1 (no isbn number), copyright 1974.

Anyone who fancies a copy should be able to get one quite easily - as of today, five copies are available (used of course!) from Amazon marketplace (which lists it rrp as 24p!) for around 75p to £2 with £2.75 postage. One vendor in particular lists the publication number so you'd be sure of getting the right thing.

Making a sunflower

I've been having a go at sewing this sunflower as an experiment to get a feel for what it's like to work a simple picture. I hasten to add that the design isn't mine, as explained below.



I've made some mistakes, so some areas are a bit thick where I had to go over them with another colour - particularly on the leaves and stem, which I couldn't get right. And the back has ended up very messy as I was moving fairly randomly from place to place once I had a particular colour in my needle - need to do some reading up about the correct technique for doing this I think! But I've enjoyed the process anyway.

I like the resulting texture. The tent stitch (not sure if I can really call it that as I didn't work it in rows) provides what feels like a really hard-wearing, smooth (ish) finish, which makes me think in terms of tacking a foot stool or chair cover at some stage when I've learnt more. It feels so much tougher than the simple upright stitch of the cushion.

The use of shading has also opened my eyes to the possibilities. I've no talent for drawing, so am going to look through my photos at the weekend and see what I've got that's simple enough for similar treatment.

The design of the sunflower is copied as best I could (ie I made lots of mistakes where I miscounted) from one of the flowers on a lovely completed needlepoint picture of a field of sunflowers. I bought it a few weeks ago from someone who hadn't room for all the beautiful work done by her late mother-in-law, Maureen. I'd been thinking of buying the same Anchor kit, but instead came across the completed one and figured I'd appreciate someone else's labours instead!