Sunday 3 January 2016

Embroidery bird

This year Santa brought me my first embroidery kit! This is a Nancy Nicholson kit that, once finished, can be framed or turned into a cushion, or whatever you like.


The kit come with a printed cloth with markings showing you where to sew. You also get, your needle, threads and a guide to the different embroidery stitches. I found i had to google some of the stitches to get a clearer idea of how to do them. Here's my progress so far...








The kit came with a light grey for the back ground but i've decided to keep it bright and go with green instead.



Still undecided what to do with it when it's finished, leaning towards framing it to protect it from cats....

Patchwork duvet cover

The only patchwork i have done was a hand made quilted blanket using the Victorian paper piecing method. It was a very long project and very time consuming but I'm tempted to do it again, the final results were very pleasing. In the meantime i thought a patchwork duvet cover made using my sewing machine would be a much speedier option. It was indeed faster, however very repetitive and boring. I hope i don't forget that and embark on another patch work machine project....

The duvet cover was to match my green bedroom so the first task took many weeks: finding the right fabric.


I decided to try a basic chevron design thinking i'll start with something easy and advance to a more technical design for my next project (won't be doing that in a hurry). My chevrons were compiled of triangles which i cut out using a rotary cutter. Firstly i cut some plain cream coloured squares (25x25cm) and the same again in my patterned fabric then overlocked them right sides together.



I then cut through the two fabrics diagonally to get four squares; half plain half patterned.


Then i lined up the colours to make a chevron.




I made up eight rows which gave me a finished piece measuring two metres by two metres. I took the cream fabric from a pre-made duvet cover and i kept the back half to add to my new chevron front. I also had the strip of poppers to re-use!



Final project modelled by Billy :)