TAST interview

This year it’s been 10 years since the first run of TAST. TAST stands for Take A Stitch Tuesday, an embroidery challenge at Sharon’s Pin Tangle. Throughout the year Sharon is going to run a series of interviews with stitchers and asked me to be the first. It feels very special! This interview brought lots of people to my blog and I’m happy some of you made time to leave a comment.

I wrote a post about my old cross stitch experiments to accompany this interview, you can read it here. And here you can  see what I did with the dragon embroidery.

Old cross stitch experiments

Today I want to share some of my old projects with cross stitches, because there’s so much you can do with this basic stitch. It’s fun to experiment and I hope this will inspire you to give it a try. I think many embroiderers started with counted cross stitch projects. This detail of my gorse fairies is the biggest piece I made, it took me almost 30 years to complete!

I also used cross stitch to embroider TAST on the spine of my TAST 2012 fabric book. Just 2 threads of stranded floss on Aida.

Instead of stitching on linen or Aida you can also use a different fabric. Gingham is a nice first step. I used 2 and 4 threads of stranded floss to stitch this Leo.

Here I used cross stitch to alter the look of the Gingham before I embroidered my rope. The cross stitches on this piece are done in cotton a broder.

Altering fabric with stitches is a lot of fun. This next experiment is cross stitch in cotton a broder on a patterned white fabric. The squares on the fabric made it easy to stitch.

My next sample is part of a fabric book page with different fabrics. Here I stitched a cross stitch border to secure the edge. I didn’t use any guidelines, just stitched the pattern eyeballing it. I only made sure all stitches were stitched in the same direction.

To experiment with stitches it’s good to look at the parts of the stitch. Cross stitch is just 2 crossed straight stitches. As long as they cross each other it’s a cross stitch, so they don’t have to be the same size and they don’t have to cross all in the same direction if you’re not working in counted work.  That’s just what I did on this detail of a fabric card. Again the thread is cotton a broder.

You can also use cross stitch to quilt. On this Teesha Moore inspired patch I played with the size and angle of the cross stitch in stranded floss.

It’s fun to stitch on paper instead of fabric. Here I stitched on thicker paper to make a word in my altered book. Embroidery is a nice combo with journaling!

Here I stitched on a photo. I used tape to secure my threads, knots would be too bulky to attach it to my journaling spread. I wrote about the making of this spread with lots of progress photos of the embroidery here.

In this last example I took the cross stitch in another direction. I replaced the straight stitch parts by buttonhole bars. So I stitched crossed buttonhole bars and added some normal cross stitches.

Just click the links if you want to read more about one of these projects.

CQ patch for Johnny

From time to time I participate in a Teesha Moore inspired patch swap. I made this patch for Johnny for an embroidered patch swap. Of course I thought about CQ and wondered if I could use it in a Teesha Moore inspired patch. To make it work I made it a bit bigger, it’s 5½ by 7¼ inch. I added lace and a rose charm, which was part of a necklace. I only used stranded floss on this patch.

On this seam I stitched feather stitch and decorated it with French knots.

Here I stitched crossed buttonhole stitch.

Vandyke stitch at the right and tied herringbone with straight stitches and beads at the left.

I secured the lace and the border with French knots. The lace is decorated with larger beads in the centre.

Fancy Cats

This quilt was hidden in my cupboard for many years. I shared the start of this quilt in one of the early posts on this blog, when I only wrote them in Dutch. You can read them here and here. I finished the top in 2008, but never shared a photo. So this is how my top looked before I started adding the borders.

Here I was stitching the 36 inch seam of the first border, now I’m working on the second one. Of course it’s all done by hand!

Randje 53 & 54

I’m still working on my borders for Randje per week 2015. More info about this SAL at Randje per week. These are randje 53 & 54.

They were the last borders on page 9.

Gate stitch

Sunday Stitch School is a private challenge at Queeniepatch, gate stitch is the 7th stitch. It was new to me, so I just had to give it a try. It’s a needlepoint stitch, but I first stitched it on 14 count Aida. The first sample is in green wool and is combined with cross stitch in purple perle 12.

My second sample is done in perle 8 and 12.

And this is gate stitch on my pink 28 count linen needlepoint sampler. It’s done in perle 8. I used the instructions in Mary Thomas’s Dictionary of Embroidery Stitches.