A Bit of Everything

We had fantastic weather on the weekend so I spent most of it outside enjoying the sun. In the evening I worked on a little bit of everything.

On Friday I went to get some stitching supplies and picked up more beads from Michaels for another bead experiment. Lately in shops, I've been seeing what looks like bead bracelets that are crocheted. They come with a hefty price tag. Now, I'm all for encouraging crafters, but I'm not willing to pay that amount to a big brand store when I know that if I put my mind to it, I can make it myself. After lots of googling, I figured out the technique is called Crochet Bead Rope. I found a fantastic tutorial on YouTube and away I went.

It's a really simple technique and very zen once you get the hang of it. My only complaint: stringing beads is very tedious. It's very easy to loose track and end up with a bad sequence and you won't realize it until you've halfway crocheted the rope and it's too late to fix and everything has to be undone.

Now the best thing about this is, I can pick the colors and patterns I want so it matches my wardrobe. For my first try, I'm using DMC perl cotton #12 in black with Toho 11/0 beads in gold and gunmetal. The pattern is one I found on Pinterest. Not the most ideal thread and beads but I'm playing so it's okay. Once I've finished making up this bracelet, I'll have to do a comparison between it and Kumihimo and see which one I prefer.

I also received the second lesson for the Sardinian knot stitch class I'm taking with Virtual Threads. So I added the second layer. I'm really liking my choice of thread colors. I'm probably just going to alternate between the ecru and blue.

I can't forget whitework :) I signed up for an Italian Drawn Thread class with my local guild the Lakeshore Creative Stitchery Guild. It's a two day class, so I had to take the day off for it but it's totally worth it.

The class is thought by one of the guild members named Fiore Fonda who is a fount of information on not just Italian embroidery but other styles as well. Which is why I took the class. To be honest, I don't even know what the actual finished project is supposed to be (tea towel? decorative hand towel?). I took it more for the technique and learning aspect than the finished product.

We are stitching on a fabric called Soteima L20 (I might have that wrong since I can't find anything on it on google) and using DMC broder special #25 and DMC cordonnet #80. The class starts off with the buttonhole stitch, lots and lots of buttonholes. I think by the end of this project I will either hate the sight of them or will get very good at them and learn to like them :) By the end of the day, we managed to start the drawn thread on the tear drop we had stitched.

The finished project will look like the one below at the end, but there is a lot to do before it ends up looking like this. In fact I have 3 weeks until the next class and I have to stitch all the buttonholes for the 5 other tear drops. It seems like a very daunting task, but I was actually able to stitch another tear drop in my evening stitch meeting yesterday. So I'm feeling pretty confident.

Sfilati Fantasia by Fiore Fonda