Welcome to the weekly celebration of the art of slowly stitching by hand! We encourage you to slow down, breathe deeply, take a few stitches, and enjoy seeing the slowly created projects of hand stitching gurus from around the world.
There have been 2 major hand stitching projects for me this week. First, because it is Easter (sending Happy Easter wishes for those who celebrate) I pushed myself to finish an ornament of an Easter Egg.
It was tricky to construct and I used glue (for the first time) to stick the stitched piece to cardboard. Then I cut an egg from a lovely blue fabric for the back, put a piece of batting on each side of the cardboard and glued the two sides together (with a ribbon in the middle so it can hang). Then I hand stitched the two sides together around the edge.
The design is called Easter (Stitch Craft by Mary) and the pattern showed a pink colourway. I changed mine to blue and spent a long (happy) time digging around in my thread collection to find 6 blues from light to dark. It was so delightful to stitch, and because of the design construction and not needing to count much, I made no mistakes at all (very rare)!
The finished size is 3.5" x 4.5" and I am so happy how it turned out. It has 1,985 cross stitches and a few backstitches (which I thought brought some life to the butterfly and the lilies of the valley). And it is finished in time for the Easter Bunny to deliver it!
My second project is for the month of April and is a pattern called "Quick Quaker" by Modern Folk Embroidery. It is a stitch-a-long on instagram and each day you stitch some of the pattern and post your progress (if you want).
I am using a variety of green threads on a tea dyed 18 count aida cloth. The symbolism is the return of green in the spring (all greens go together in nature) and everything growing out of the ground/dirt/brown. I have no idea how it will turn out, or if I will like the end result of my colour choices, but it is very fun everyday to pick a new green and put approximately 150 stitches in. And Jacob from Modern Folk Embroidery is posting a video every day of the SAL.
So that is what I have been up to this week. How about you? Please link up your blog post below and share your projects with us!