Boring But Necessary

We had our monthly Japanese embroidery meeting on Saturday. I made good progress, just not something that's visually appealing. I worked on outlining the cords of the fans in preparation for our upcoming class. This is something that needs to be put in before stitching. It gives you a guide when stitching and a little bit of padding along the edge. I've got one side, completed and started the other.

I want to get these done ASAP as I will be away on another work trip right before our class. This time it will be in Winnipeg. Any readers from Winnipeg with recommendations of embroidery/fabric/bead shops?

Weekend Update + Make

I'm not late for once! I had the entire weekend to myself so I was able to make lots of progress. I even made pancakes on Saturday.

I was able to finish restitching my woven effect leaf. It looks much better now.

I got lots of beading done as well. I emptied my second pack of beads. This pieces uses a lot of beads in this champagne color. It's very pretty but I'm looking forward to switching to another color. Not long now, I'm at the midway point. I'm currently trying to decide if I should switch out one of the beads for a different color.

And I made something :) About two months ago, I bought my first sewing machine. I've been wanting one for ages and started to seriously shop for one. After picking one, a Janome QDC machine, I was going to wait a little to save up for it, but an opportunity came up that I couldn't pass up. The manufacturer had a special rebate and the store put an additional promotion on top of it. It meant I was able to shave the tax and a bit more of the final price. We have a 15% sales tax here in Quebec, so it was a pretty good discount.

It's been in it's box since I brought it home as I try to figure out a place to put it. I still haven't setup a place, but decided I needed to make myself a fabric basket to hold all my stitching frames while they are not in use. I usually put them in a corner of my room but they keep falling over. It took me ALL day. Sweat and blood (literally) went into making this piece, but I ended up with something that I can use. It's a little floppy, I guess my interfacing wasn't thick enough, and I noticed one side is coming apart (I can fix that!). Still pretty good for my first time. The fabric is Blue Peonies by Rifle Paper Co. who is fast becoming my favorite fabric designer, and the lining is by Robert Kaufman from their Essex series.

I'm hoping to gain enough skills to make this bag. I bought the pattern from a quilt shop in Calgary with the fabric and hardware. Now just need courage to start. I found the hardest part was making sure everything is straight. Cutting straight, stitching straight... Any tips would be helpful.

Really Late Update

I meant to post these last week but got busy. My guild's exhibition was coming up (it was this weekend, more this in a later post) and I wanted to submit the Tree of Life. It needed to be stretched and the back covered first though. So I spent a few evenings working on that.

On nights when I didn't have much stitching time, I would work on Hedebo Starburst. By putting in a 30 minutes here and there, I was able to clear up two corners and am halfway to getting a third done.

When I have more time in the evening, I would work on beading the mermaids. I'm slowly making my way up to the middle.

What I've really wanted to do was work on my Japanese embroidery, but it's not something I can just work on at the spur of the moment. It requires a full free day and those have been very rare this summer. I finally got a free Sunday two weeks ago (it was raining all day) and I sat down to rework the woven effect leaf. I decided after speaking with the group that I can do better. You can see where the arrow is pointing my mistake. So I spent a few hours ripping everything out.

I was only able to get this far as I ran out of the blue. Luckily someone from my group had a spare reel so I'll be able to work on it this weekend (crossing my fingers).

August TUSAL

As I write this today I'm realizing I haven't posted in almost a month. I really need to do better. It's not like I'm not stitching as you can see from my ORT jar. This month I do have a legitimate reason, I was in Calgary for two weeks for work (yes, there were some stash purchases made) and then when I got back I caught a cold and was out for a week. I'm just starting to get back to my regular schedule now.

I do have some progress to share with you. I've started working on the drawn thread portion of my hedebo piece. It's very slow right now as I'm unwinding fabric thread and taking it to the back. I'm going to be doing this for a while.

I also completed all the stitching on my mermaids and have started putting in beads.

There are so many beads in this piece, I'm loving it.