Knitting and Stitching and Hooking

Hello, the friendly face in the photograph above is Sue of crafts at home blogspot. Yvonne and I fought our way through the crowds at the Harrogate Knitting and Stitching Show on Friday, to find Sue and her stand in the designers and makers section.

 Sue was selling her ingenious little mirrors, magnets, badges and hair slides beautifully decorated with colourful fabric backs. We spent ages trying to make up our minds which ones we would take home with us. We especially wanted to meet up with Sue as she had very kindly sent me two complimentary tickets to the show - how great was that! It's always lovely to meet friends from the Blogosphere, and I'm sure Sue and I will meet again.

We then went to say hello to Mandy Patullo whose work we both adore. Mandy is giving a workshop at Jane-Ann's studio next year so we were mightily excited you can believe me, to see her work 'in the flesh'. I can also reveal we both came away with one of Mandy's little bird textiles, I'll have to show you in a later post. I didn't take any photographs there and then.

I was delighted to come across a new-to-me stand selling  Donegal Tweed. This is such beautiful fabric and if you love wool and felt and blanket, you wouldn't be able to resist it. I wasn't! I had a lovely chat to Margaret, who is herself from Donegal, and she is sending me the most gorgeous book which I will show you next time - they had sold out on the second day of the show!

Here's Margaret, smiling at my inability to choose between the gorgeous rolls of tweed - I could happily have happily taken the entire stand home with me!

Look! What's not to love! If you google Fabric Affair, Donegal Tweed you will find their website. I can't wait to get going with my little stash! It will make great bangles, and is also great to applique with.

Here is Louise, who does much of the stitching of the samples on the stand. I didn't get chance to speak to her as she was busy with customers.

We managed to see the stands we had marked on our programme, Yvonne renewing her acquaintance with Val Holmes, machine embroiderer supreme, me finding that Jean at Oliver Twists does indeed still hand-dye the soft cotton I love to stitch with, both of us swooning with pleasure at the tactile and visual delights at 21st Century Yarns. I did indulge myself with some hand-dyed variegated wool felt. It is SOOOoooooo beautiful!

A few more purchases at other stalls and we felt we had had enough - impossible to get through the crush to the food outlet, and not prepared to eat our lunch sitting on the floor - why are these events so woefully badly organised for the comfort of the paying punters? - we decided to make our escape about 1pm. We were extremely lucky with the weather so it wasn't a bad drive both ways, though we were very tired when we reached our respective homes.

And the gorgeousness didn't end there - Saturday found us trundling along the damp and dirty November Norfolk lanes to Jane-Ann's at Swanton Novers. It was a hive of industry.

Yes, I did find and take with me the rag rug seat cover I'm working on! And I did hook away for a couple of hours too. Then I completed another bangle for Yvonne.

Yvonne finished her sunflower cushion with wonderful attention to detail.

Jackie worked on a commission from the craft fair........

Nadine got stuck in to another of her geometric rugs .......

Monica hooked away for a while then decided she wasn't satisfied so she engaged in what we quilters
call 'frogging' and rug hookers call 'reverse hooking'!

Jane-Ann demonstrated a brilliant braiding technique, made us a lovely lunch, and kept her work-space looking spic and span. I'd love to say my sewing room looks remotely as tidy as this - but that is never going to happen!

                        Just a few shots of the treasure trove of lovely things found in the studio.......

I hope you've enjoyed the luscious textile eye candy in this post. It has been a couple of full-on days dedicated to cloth, wool, thread and colour. We'll need a week to get over all the excitement! See you soon, have a good week.

Stitchin'

Still feeling like I'm hanging around, marking time waiting for yet another hospital appointment, I have felt oddly dislocated from everyday life. Obviously, some things get done because they have to - bit of shopping, bit of housework, mum's life to organise, but otherwise partly due to not feeling great, and partly because of the weather, I have hunkered down and just gone with the flow. So I've been reading a bit, planning new stitching projects, playing a bit of music - and stitching. Oooh, lots of stitching. But before I got into the stitching I was having another little tidy and decided, with all the new pincushions I seem to have acquired, I should really ditch this old one, which was beginning to shred on the underneath.

I've had this for goodness knows how many years. I always felt awkward to be honest, sticking pins and needles into it, I always avoided the face bit. Yes, I know, I'm daft. Anyway, as I'm about to throw it into the bin I can feel a needle buried deep inside the  mouse. So I think I'd better get it out, don't want the bin-men getting a needle-stick injury, do we? So I cut it open and pulled out the stuffing.

And discovered not one, but THIRTY ONE needles buried inside! Count 'em!

Incredible, isn't it? And some of them have been there a long time - see those really tiny sharps quilting needles? They are the very finest, and I haven't used them for years - I doubt I could see the eye let alone thread it!

Then I sorted all my little sewing baskets out and got rid of a load of rubbish. After which I got out the two felt projects I'm currently working on. Both are commissions, and I'm thoroughly enjoying working on them.

A new bangle, in Someone's favourite colours. Very much smaller than the ones I've already made as she has such tiny wrists. I think I may make a second version in slightly different colour combinations.

The second commission is somewhat larger than the bangle, you saw the beginnings of it in my last post. Here are some snippets to whet your appetite!

Loved stitching the holly and berries.

Now I love the effect of the stippling, especially with the variegated thread. But OH! It does take an age! You really have to be careful that you keep the depth of stippling  even , it is easy to over-work one area .

So there you are. I'm quite excited planning the next angel - I'm refining my ideas all the time I'm stitching, and gathering ideas from many folk - art sources. I'm having another stitch day tomorrow, hoping to have finished the angel by tea-time.

The weather is getting colder, it was 3 degrees this morning when I went into town. Fingers crossed it says reasonably OK on Friday as Yvonne and I are going up to Harrogate for the Knitting and Stitching Show. I'll tell you how it went next time.

"well, my bags are packed......"

Yes, it's that time of year again - I'm off to the Burwell Bash later today. My instruments are all ready - including the lost shoulder - rest so I can breath again! Here's one instrument which won't be coming with me - not this year anyway.

Yes, the dulcimer will remain hanging on the wall for the time being, I've had no time to do more than try out a few chords and right-hand strum rhythms so it will just be excess baggage. This is my 7th (or is it my 8th?) Burwell and I have slowly and painfully learned not to take too much stuff - keep it simple!

The weather promises to be mixed, but that never seems to matter at Burwell, and many of us believe it exists in its own little time-and-space zone, so the outside weather doesn't apply. Here in West Norfolk it is very overcast and very very warm this morning, despite the rain we had last night the heavy oppressive feeling hasn't gone so perhaps another storm is in the pipeline.

Yesterday was lovely though, despite prognostications to the reverse; hot as anything here, and Jim, who was at the Holkham Game Fair all day said it was even hotter there - I know what it's like to be marooned in the middle of a large field on a blisteringly hot day! At least they had some shade. I was in the garden all afternoon.

                                                                  Mandatory floral shot.

This beautifully coloured hollyhock is a stray, left over from goodness knows when, we haven't had hollyhocks in the garden for years. In fact there would have been a couple more had Jim not been so quick to weed out these mysteriously huge-leaved plants which arrived from no-where! Hopefully it will set lots of seed.

I'd like to say I was weeding and tidying, and doing all that green-fingered kinda stuff - but I wasn't.

After perusing the paper, and filling in most of the cross-word - sorry, Jim! ........

I settled down in the comfy wicker chair, with a good dollop of sun-protection cream all over me ......

....and set to work with this pile of delicious loveliness. Aren't those cottons beautiful? I have collected them over a few years from various quilt shows and the Knitting and Stitching Show. My absolute favourites are from Jean Oliver who hand-dyes her cotton and trades under Oliver Twists, I'm sure many of you have come across them. And they are such a nice firm as well, you never see them get hot under the collar at shows, unlike some other people I could name. (but shan't!) My problem is these days you don't seem to be able to find their variegated medium soft cotton thread, it is lovely to work with. All they seem to have on the website are the textured bundles of "one -offs" and "two-offs" which I don't want. I've contacted Rainbow Silks and Caroline says they don't stock anything else, and their own website doesn't have them either. So if you are off to a show this summer and see Oliver Twist, ask them to put their medium soft cottons back on sale!!

Anyway, this is what I was stitching. I finished the pin-cushion.

I'm quite chuffed with it, actually, it was such a nice little thing to work on and quick to make up. More of these in my head for later execution!

I also got onto the embroidery of the new cushion, it was a little warm at times, stitching away at this large piece of felted blanket, but well worth it.

For most of my wool applique I use a simple straight stitch, as I don't like the heavy effect that all-over blanket stitch gives. However, for the 'grassy edge' here, I thought I would use it in order to give the scallops a hard edge, and I really like it. I particularly like the variegated perle cotton I've used here.

I used perle no. 5 for the french knots, it has a slightly shinier look compared to the softer medium cotton.

So there you have it, a lovely afternoon of stitching and browsing the papers. I should, of course, have been doing my ironing in preparation for packing but hey, I've got all morning today ......

I'm not taking my lap-top with me, so I won't be blogging from Burwell, but I will be taking lots of photographs and I'll tell you all about it next time. So for now, have a good week ...ooooh school holidays, you lucky people.... and I will catch up with you next week.