Bloomin’ Marvellous : 2

This one’s good fun if you’re into learning new stitches. It’s a bit of a sampler. I learnt up and down blanket stitch while working on this bloom – and fell a bit in love with it...

Tagged...

Lesley of Tintock Tap tagged me with a Kreativ Blogger award a while ago… well, better late than never. Thanks, Lesley. And sorry to keep you waiting.


In keeping with the spirit of the tagged award, I have to share seven things about myself and then tag seven other bloggers. I’m on a bit of an embroidery bent at the moment, so here are seven related facts about me:

1) My mom got me started on embroidery, but I’m largely self-taught.
2) I’m easily bored, so go for smaller projects with lots of different stitches – probably why I enjoy creative and Jacobean embroidery.
3) The stitch I enjoy doing most is palestrina.
4) Bullions are my nemesis. It’s an ongoing war.
5) The last stitch I learnt was up and down blanket stitch.
6) I’ve done a goldwork course, but have only ever finished the piece we had to work on in the course. And I cut corners to get it done.
7) I’m right-handed, but thread needles left-handed.

So there you have it.

And I’m tagging seven blogs that I read as often as possible:

Anything goes. The go-to blog for all things design.
Knot Garden. Stunning objects, neatly stitched, and beautifully styled photographs.
UK lass in US. Fun project ideas, plus UK English to US English translations.
¼ of an inch. Regular Sunday Stash posts for ogling fabric.
Jen Renninger. Fantastic illustrations.
The Quilted Turtle. Insider info about living on an island with no cars, with quilting thrown in.
She wears shwe shwe. Although this blog hasn’t been updated recently, it’s a poignant reminder of home and beautifully illustrates the traditional use for shwe shwe – one of my favourite fabrics.

Bloomin’ Marvellous : 1

The weather’s turned, leaves are falling and winter is on its way – to the northern hemisphere at any rate. So I’ve decided to design another series of free embroidery patterns while stuck indoors for the next few months.

The theme is a bloomy one, although loosely interpreted, because the real blooms have faded and flowery designs are just fun to stitch. I’ve picked my fabric – white cotton and textured Irish linen – and a variety of muted, but light coloured six-stranded DMC threads and Mill Hill glass embroidery beads.


The design process will be quite different compared with the way I did the Jacobean Leaves, in that I’m going to post patterns as I design instead of finishing the entire project first. Two reasons for this: I don’t know what the finished article is yet, and it’ll be more spontaneous and creative this way.

It won’t be entirely random, though, as each design will fit neatly into a 4x4" square, or about 10x10cm. So the plan is to end up with a stack of embroidered squares to make up into… something. I’m going to stick to embroidering on white, because I have that piece of soft white cotton that needs embellishing, and I’ll decide where the linen comes into it once all the white blocks have been embroidered. As for how many blocks, well, that depends on how many ideas pop into my head. I’m aiming for somewhere between 12 and 24.

These are the DMC threads that I’ve chosen: 815, 816, 920, 3854, 727, 3078, 3857, 3858, 3859, 3722, 224, 407, 3860, 435, 434, 598, 931, 924, 3768, 503, 927, 3363, 3052, 3364, 522, 469, 772 and 938. But in the spontaneous spirit of this project, I may decide to add another one or two or not use some of these colours along the way. But this is the basic palette I’ll be using and I’ll put the DMC colour numbers on to each pattern in case you like the same shades.

So without further ado, here’s Bloomin’ Marvellous 1:

What colour is your DNA?

I’m in the process of coming up with a new project and find myself once again choosing threads from the same palette that I subconsciously draw from each and every time, albeit slightly different tones this time round.


My favourite red DMC embroidery thread is number 816, for example. More often than not, it’s the shade I’ll pull out of my floss box first when a design calls for red. It’s also one of MTMs regular reds. And neither of us is overly fond of pastels, or pinks and purples. Although we both like dusty shades of those colours.

It got me to thinking: Is colour preference hereditary? Do I prefer certain colours because my parents and their parents before them are (or were) genetically predisposed to those colours? Are these preferences built into my DNA? Or do I choose them simply because I’m used to seeing them and they’ve become a bit of a habit?

As one does, I turned to Google for insight. But I didn’t find out much on the subject. There are studies on colour preferences between the sexes – one found that women tend to gravitate towards the red end of the red-green spectrum more than men, and both sexes choose blue more often than yellow – but I couldn’t find anything straightforward regarding hereditary predisposition to certain hues, tints, shades and tones of the colour spectrum. And I like yellow just as much as blue, sometimes more depending on the shade.

The more I stitch, the more defined my palette becomes. I add to it constantly, but more often than not with shades and tones of the same basic colours to which I’m instinctively drawn. I’m presuming this is (or was) the same for MTM, my gran, her mom and so on up my maternal family tree of stitchers. So if we do inherit our colour preferences, I guess mine are pretty much set in stone – or should I say, my DNA.

Going out with a bang, stitched up or in a puff of smoke

I spent an afternoon at the British Museum recently, primarily to see the display of Chinese ceramics. But it’s the Ghanaian coffins that have stuck with me.

Local carpenters can shape and paint your coffin to resemble absolutely anything – there’s even a camera coffin in the museum’s collection. A search online unearthed everything from Mercs (the favoured car in Africa) to fish to cellphones to aeroplanes to pineapples. One man’s love of smoking made him choose a cigarette coffin, a sort of fly in the face of adversity deathbed gesture. But my favourite has to be this one:


I’ve entertained the notion of foregoing a coffin and being cremated in my favourite quilt, but haven’t been able to get my head around wasting a good quilt like that. Perhaps I could get a friendly Ghanaian carpenter to carve me a wooden version instead…

Eye candy

I caught a TV rerun of Nanny McPhee the other night and just had to watch it again to see the children’s bedroom or, more specifically, their bedding.


The story is enchanting and the cast and sets inspired, so no chore there. But that bedding makes me want to open an orphanage.

There’s a log cabin quilt, a tumbling blocks quilt, a star quilt of sorts, an afghan square crochet blanket, tartan blankets, lace-edged pillow slips, whitework and cutwork pillow cases… even the curtains are patchwork.





Stitchers inevitably notice quilts, crochet blankets and the like when watching movies. But the measles scene in Nanny McPhee is sensory overload – in the most delightful way.

Green, the new pink

Two-thirds of the way through an embroidery project and suddenly I’ve gone off it – no surprise there, it’s not the first time this has happened to me. And I know from experience that if I switch to another needlecraft for a bit, I’ll soon be hankering after embroidery again.

There’s plenty on the to do list. There always is. But you know when you just don’t feel like doing anything on that list, because it seems too much like work and not enough like play? Exactly.

What I really felt like doing was a bit of quick and easy crochet. Specifically, some of the flowers and leaves out of 100 Flowers to Knit and Crochet, which I got more than two months ago and still hadn’t gotten around to using. But a few stray balls of handknit cotton and 4-ply in greens, cream, white, brown and black didn’t exactly conjure up images of bright summer blooms.

The urge to crochet overrode my colour consternation and, well, seize the day and all that – why should a little thing like a lack of suitable supplies get in the way of crocheting pleasure? And so I give you a chocolate box lazy daisy, anaemic clover, forest green hellebore and a green, black and white old-fashioned pink.