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The first row is Double Chain Stitch
The rest of the rows are variations of working Trellis Stitch into the Vs of the feather stitch.
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|  The last time I posted I was about to head off on holiday and I had a lovely week away, the image is me enjoying Fairy Floss at Berry Market.
When I got home I was somewhat distracted and it has taken me a while to get back into the routine of stitching and blogging…some of what I have been up to will be revealed as I get back to blogging my sampler which I have now begun to update.
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Leading up to Easter with the help of my sister and my friend we had blitz the house getting it cleaner and more organized than what it has been for many a year, then after Easter with the house still clean I decided that it was time for some stitching. I wanted to make my friend a couple of small cuddle quilts for her to give to her grandkids.
As it turned out we ended up with two not so small quilts because we decided that for one of the quilts we would finish one that I already had peiced and partly quilted…after we had finished the quilting and bound the edges and finished it as a quillow, I added a few small appliques to personlize it a bit…the fish down the bottom seems to have got himself a little lost….
For the second quilt we started by using the same design as the first and made up the red and green nine patches, when we had them done and started looking for fabrics to go with them we decided that squares would suit this quilt better and with the help of another friend and her stach we chose enough fabrics for the squares, while looking for the fabrics for the squares we had pulled out the fabric that we ended up using for the borders.
And now my friend has gone home I won’t be getting straight back into blogging because bright and early tomorrow morning I am heading off with a couple of other friends for a 2 week caravaning holiday.
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These are our 2009 Painted Easter Eggs (prior years eggs can be seen here.)
This year I painted my egg into a Kokeshi Doll, I had the idea last year when I visited the Cowera Japanese Garden and saw there display of Kokeshi Dolls and thought how well there simple shapes would fit around an egg.
Eggs are a unique shape and over the years that we have been painting eggs it has been interesting to see how the egg shape can be used, it makes some things are really difficult to represent other things fit quite naturally onto the egg shape.
This year my sister also thought of an idea that fitted naturally onto the egg, she is reading the Cadfael novels by Ellis Peters which inspired her to paint her egg as a monk complete with tonsured head and I love his little sandled feet.
 
 The egg shape also fitted my niece’s idea, when she was young I made her cups of tea in a miniature china tea set (cup is about 1 1/2 inches high), when I bought the miniature tea set she was unable to say cuppa and would ask me if she could have a Pucka tea, she has fond memories of those occassions and wanted to make her egg into a Pucka Tea Cup…As I said the egg shape was suitable for making a cup but it was not so easy to achieve because it required sawing the egg in half across the weakest area of the shell, I broke a few eggs trying and in the end we used one that I repaired with paper machae and then reinforced around the rim with finger nail Acrylic, I also used the finger nail Acrylic to attach the wire handle, the saurcer is made from cardboard.
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Tonight I have a few quite moments after a very hectic month, an old friend has been in town and when my daughter got a new bed, a king single to replace a single bed it meant that I had to reorganize her room to fit it in my friend helped and once we were started on cleaning and reorganizing we started on the rest of the house, it has taken a lot of time but has been well worth the effort and I am feeling more organized than I have for many years and now with a clean more organized house I am ready to enjoy easter and have the eggs blown and undercoated ready to paint tomorrow…click her for posts about our painted easter eggs.
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| The last couple of weeks have been unusually buzy with a vaiety of activities happening, one of those activities was getting a new, well second hand but new to me Lap Top Computer, very exciting but has meant installing programes and getting it set up, some of which is know done and with a bit of time to spare now I can catch up what I have been doing on my sampler.
These are a couple of feather stitch variations from The Batsfords Encyclopedia of Embroidery Stitches by Anne Butler…Sharon reviewed this book when she found it.
The first 2 lines are whipped feather stitch, the first one is whipped in the same thread and the second line is whipped with a contrasting thread…
The 3rd line is knotted feather stitch, it has the knot formed on the central side of the thread…in the 4th line I was testing wether there was much of a visual difference if I formed the knot on the outside edge side of the thread, there is more shape to the central spine of the stitch.
 
The last line is recording Autumn, I was playing around with doing big block letters down the line when a friend visited and suggested having the letters smaller and falling down like Autumn leaves.
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|  This is the 7th panel of my sampler (The first 6 panels can be seen here)…It brings the total length to 27 feet 2 inches…This panel is made up of 3 fabrics, the middle one being the one I printed my memorial to the floods and bushfires and where I joined it onto the bottom fabric I covered the seam by painting about 1/2 inch below the seam and a bit over the seam with brown paint and then used random feather stitches to add a touch of green vegetation for the new growth that will come.
The Tags/bookmarks down the side of this panel are a sewing charm to mark the samplers anniversary, an Australia map charm to mark Australia day and a heart to mark Valentines day.
  
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|  A Friends sister has horses that are stabled just a few minutes drive away and today we went out to there and collected bags of her stable sweepings to put on my garden.
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|  Last week when sewing with Sharon she pulled some brown chenille out of my box and suggested that I could stitch a teddy bear with it…I drew a bear shape and used pearl thread to back stitch around it, I was glad that I thought to do longer back stitches because the chenille needed the extra space…for the legs and arms I trellis stited down one side and then as I stitched the second side I laced the thread through the first side between each stitch, for the body I die a row of trellis down both sides and then laced the 2 sides together down the centre, the head is spiral trellis stitch, the ears, which are not attached to the fabric are a row of 3 sitches and a row of 2 stitches.
 I named him Boo Boo because he reminded me of my child hood bear who was in turn named after Boo Boo, Yogi Bear’s offsider…And what did Boo Boo do? I blamed my child hood bear for the naughty things that I did and this little Boo Boo left brown fluff on Sharon’s floor.
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