fabric scraps textile artist, stitching by hand, thread, embroidery, stitch journal

Shop news

After a very busy few weeks, the shop is about as full as it can be.

I’ve re-stocked a limited quantity of hand-painted chiffon scraps:

There are still some other lovely fabric packs too.

I’ve made some new half-skein Randoms thread collections – these are (broadly) colour-coordinated half skeins from my current thread range, in sets of 8-10. Good for small projects, and good for expanding your thread collection. Because we all need more thread, right?

I’ve curated some cotton threads collections, one of each from my current range of cotton threads:

And I’ve made some really pretty mini-collections of silk threads, one each of silk perle 8, silk perle 12, and fine silk:

Good for secret Santas and stocking fillers, because we probably have to start talking about Christmas.

I’ll be closing my shop around 10th December-ish, only for the holidays and only for tangible items that need posting; PDFs will continue to be available throughout the holiday period. It seems early to be closing, but I really can’t do the whole panic-last-minute rush thing, spending entire afternoons in a queue at the post office, worrying about whether post is going to arrive in time etc. Last date for overseas orders (that’s outside UK) will be around 2nd December – so if you’re not in the UK, you’ve got about three weeks to buy what you need 😱

Three weeks? Better start writing a few lists myself…

Happy shopping! Get in touch if you have any questions about any of the products, and thank you as always for your valued support. I know I couldn’t do any of this without you.

Fabric heaven

It’s been a busy week of curating and creating some lovely new fabric scrap packs.

There’s a new selection of black/white/neutral sheer and semi-sheer fabrics for you to layer and/or paint:

This one contains scraps of very sheer nylon chiffon, unusual textured tulles, dress nets and plain tulle, two-tone voile, and black and white printed chiffon that takes paints and inks beautifully. These are synthetic fabrics so they won’t take fibre-reactive dye. I’ve had great success using diluted acrylic inks on these fabrics – the inks are semi-translucent so they don’t interfere with the sheerness of the fabrics, and they’re pretty much colourfast when dry.

There’s a collection of hand-painted fabrics (and I’m especially pleased with this one):

hand-painted chiffon, tulle and other scraps

This one contains paint-dyed synthetic chiffon, painted textured tulle, fine nylon chiffon, hand-dyed cotton scrim and a few snippets of hand-dyed cotton organdie and other tiny scraps. Fabulous for layering, and good for my Stitched Samples for Sketchbooks course, and my Stitch a Little Landscape course too.

And finally, if you like a little luxury in your layered stitching, there’s a collection of hand-dyed silk organza and silk chiffon:

The silk chiffon is ultra-soft and floaty; the organza is stiffer and semi-transparent. This one comes with a couple of yards of hand-dyed/tea-dyed silk ribbon.

hand-dyed silk organza and chiffon scraps

I even made new labels and sourced some compostable cellophane bags to package them in.

These collections are available now while existing stocks last; I don’t plan to restock before Christmas so when they’re gone they’re gone. Still lots of choice in threads too. Just saying.

Overseas news: I’ve now sent a couple of trial packages to the US, one of which has been delivered (it took about a week) and the other is well on its way. The system appears to be working fairly smoothly.

Unfortunately for anyone in Canada, Royal Mail is not currently delivering there due to the postal strike. You can still place an order if you want to, and I will post it when the current troubles have been resolved.

Wishing everyone a lovely weekend.

Paint-dyeing

I paint-dyed some chiffon fabric this week.

It’s the same technique demonstrated in my Stitch a Little Landscape course, very easy and very effective. Any fabric paints will work; acrylic inks will work too.

If you let the fabric partly dry while it’s scrunched up, you get these really attractive watermark effects where the colour settles into the creases:

An unexpected extra – I laid the fabric strips to dry on some packaging paper and now I have free collage paper too:

Some of the chiffon will end up in sheer fabric scrap packs next month. I’m pretty pleased with these, which is always a good way to end the working week.

Have a lovely weekend.

Fabrics

I’ve been sorting through my fabrics and scraps, and I’ve put together a couple of options that are now available in the shop.

The first is a sheer and semi-sheer/textured fabrics scraps pack that looks a bit like this:

FSH – sheer fabrics scraps pack, example

You can see average contents here:

sheer fabrics collection

The second is a lightweight fabrics selection, mostly hand-dyed, and mostly cotton with some scraps of silk and/or linen:

And one in the making:

lightweight fabrics

Both packs are good for layering, to create little landscapes or stitched samples. I used some of the scraps to create a very long cloth, which I’m starting to explore.

Not sure where this one is going, but it looks like a long road. It’s about 4″ wide by about eight feet.

Have a lovely weekend.

Making Zen workshop

Just a quick fly-through to remind you that my free Making Zen workshop is available for 24 hours today. Depending on your time zone, you may need to wait for it to become available.

If you want to watch this (and the other 30+ workshops) in your own time, and if you want access to the inspirational artist free gifts, then you’ll need to upgrade to the VIP pass, which you can do here. It’s absolutely worth having, if you can – the value of the free gifts alone is over $3,300, and you get ongoing access to everything.

For transparency, upgrading to the VIP pass from the links on this page allows me to receive a small commission (at no extra cost to you) that helps to support my work as an independent artist.

Thank you, and enjoy!

Shop News

I’ve been busy producing this over the last couple of days:

It will take me a while to sort and wind the thread, as each skein has to be made by hand on this rather Heath Robinson contraption:

It’s basically an upended chair with a yarn swift fixed onto the seat, from which I can unwind a skein from the hank onto a niddy noddy (and the autocorrect wanted to change that to giddy body, which made me laugh). A niddy noddy is a hand-held frame that allows you to wind a set number of yards of thread into a skein. A somewhat ridiculous name, in my view, for a very useful gadget.

In the meantime, the shop is open for the remains of the last batch of threads and fabrics. A few announcements:

The global price of silk and cotton has completely sky rocketed and I have no choice but to increase my prices when the new batch is listed. I’ve managed to keep prices the same for a couple of years now so an increase is probably overdue. The existing threads in the shop are still at the old prices, so last chance to buy at this price.
Silk perle 3, extra-fine silk, and extra-fine cotton will all be discontinued when current stocks have gone. Silk boucle is currently under consideration but if I can no longer buy it at a reasonable price then that may well be up for the chop too. I haven’t dyed any more silk boucle in this batch, so what’s in the shop is all there is for now.
SLLD and SLLU fabric packs will be discontinued when current stocks are exhausted. Commercial fabrics have increased in price as well, and I have to buy the fabrics for these packs at retail prices because I don’t have the means to store wholesale quantities. I’ll continue to offer general fabric scraps packs when I can, and these will probably have broadly similar content to the SLLD packs.
I am sorry that I am currently unable to post items to Northern Ireland or Europe.

fabrics for ironing and sorting into packs

I don’t know how long it will take to get these fabrics and threads processed, but I would estimate they could be ready somewhere towards the end of the month.

Have a wonderful weekend while I attempt to find a way up the thread mountain. The colour-coded tags that you can see in the picture, by the way, are knitting markers and they’re there to tell me what kind of thread it is. It can be hard to tell what’s what when it comes out a different colour but these make it easy to see at a glance.

PS – If you haven’t got your Making Zen ticket yet (you’ll need it if you want to access the free extras from me and 31 amazing artists at the end of May), then you can get it here:

get your Making zen ticket here

Scraps

This week I’m in the scraps box as I start compiling my new forthcoming course on making stitched samples for sketchbooks. New courses take a while to create, but I do enjoy making them.

However much I take out of the scraps box, it never seems to get any emptier. It always reminds me of the fairy tale about a magic porridge pot that keeps refilling itself. Not complaining, but I do wonder where they all keep coming from.

I like to use lots of layers in my stitched samples. I think of them as transparent layers of time.

The one below is made from scraps of antique and modern lace covered with two layers of very fine tulle, with some textured cotton yarns couched onto the surface.

I’ve also been painting some lovely patterned tulles:

Fibre reactive dyes won’t work on synthetics, but fabric paints do. I use Jacquard Dye-Na-Flow, which are very liquid and behave more like dye than paint. My Stitch a Little Landscape course has a section on painting fabrics this way. You could even use standard watercolours, if you don’t need them to be washable.

At some point it will all come together nicely.

layered stitched scraps ready to become something useful

Piecing it together

Everything patchwork here this week. A little sketchbook cover, with one of Jude’s moons finding a home:

You can see that I’ve couched a thicker thread (silk perle 3) over some of the seams, just to define some of the lines.

couching in the ditch

The little book of patchwork, I’m calling it. Somewhere to collect and join fragments of thought.

Inspiration comes from unlikely places. This outdoor paving kit from The Range translates perfectly:

I’ve dug out these fragments of late Victorian patchwork, just to look and to touch the antique papers.

Victorian patchwork, impossibly tiny stitches

This week I’m putting a patchwork sampler together, just to see how that might work. At some point there will be a (hexagon-free) paper-piecing patchwork course. Nothing wrong with hexagons, but paper piecing is much more than granny’s flower garden.

Looking at, and thinking through.

hand-dyed silk organza patchwork 6″ square

Scraps

Birdie and I are in our happy place today.

I got ever so slightly sidetracked from what I started last week. I had to interrupt proceedings to deal with the scraps box, which was overflowing (and I forgot, in my distraction, to obtain photographic evidence of said abundance, but I know you’ve all seen an overflowing scraps box before, and I bet most of you have one of your own). I need the scraps box for something else right now, and that was a whole other sidetracking experience, cutting out lots and lots of paper piecing scraps. The scraps box is now temporarily a patchwork-pieces box, holding it all together.

temporary change of function for the scraps box

I sorted the scraps pile into lots of smaller collages where every tiny fragment will have its place.

I’ve also rounded up some very tiny/narrow strips and offcuts – selvedges, hems, seams, rolled hems from chiffon scarves etc) – all of which can – and will – be used.

The tiny strips can be stitched across the collaged pieces quite effectively:

There are a few little collages so far; these are about 4 or 5″ square:

I’m thinking of them as spots of time, a la Wordsworth (yes, Wordsworth again – no better poet, in my view, for exploring themes of experience, loss, and memory). In his long poem The Prelude, Wordsworth describes spots of time as moments that become profound memories with the capacity to rejuvenate and repair. I think most of the square collages might become round eventually:

collaged fabrics under a circular viewfinder

This one I think might just be complete as it is:

layered scraps, very simply stitched, about 5″ square

A square spot of time perhaps. I guess memories come in all shapes and sizes.

Spare a thought for poor birdie, though. I will be dismantling his nest.

Immersion

This piece takes its title from Wordsworth’s 1804 poem ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality’:

It hasn’t photographed well on this very dark wet Wednesday; the colours and layers are a little more subtle in real life.

The text fabric (above, top left) is a handwritten page from a nineteenth-century almanac that I scanned and printed onto tea-dyed cotton. If you iron fabric to a piece of freezer paper that exactly fits your printer (usually A4 in the UK), it’s surprisingly straightforward. I expected it to get snarled up and jammed in the bowels of the printer but it sailed through quite smoothly. I used to print on fabric quite often and had forgotten how effective it can be. If you set it with a hot (ish) iron after printing it appears to be reasonably water resistant, though I haven’t yet tried washing it.

Strength in what remains, detail of hand stitch and layered sheers

There are a couple more like this in progress, an ‘Intimations of Immortality’ mini-series, perhaps.

There’s also a heap of loveliness on the table that will be turned into something a little larger…

…related to more sketchbook exploration:

I am definitely busy.

Tag: fabric scraps

Shop news

Like this:

Fabric heaven

Like this:

Paint-dyeing

Like this:

Fabrics

Like this:

Making Zen workshop

Like this:

Shop News

Like this:

Scraps

Like this:

Piecing it together

Like this:

Scraps

Like this:

Immersion

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this:

Share this:

Like this: