Flowery stitching

Remember this Bear & Fish project? I started it a long, long time ago and every now and then I add something. Mostly to try out stitches or floss. I finished stitching the rose last week. It's a weird mix of red, pink and orange shades as I only used lonely threads from my jar with floss left-overs. I think it works. The big Dahlia-type flower on the right is next but I did choose threads from my regular stash for that as I just didn't have a big enough variety of orange and yellow in my jar. The whole image is turning out a bit kitschy but I'm ok with that. :)

Hello sailor!

Isn't he a handsome sailor Bear? I spend quite a few hours stitching his fur this weekend and I think there is still a few hours of fur stitching ahead before I'm finished! I have never fur-stitched such a large animal before so I'm kind of intuitively stitching away. Making photos during the process helps me to decide if my intuition was right. I think I did ok. :) 

p.s. last call for my Blackfriday-Smallbusinesssaturday-Cybermonday SALE, it ends today!

Unusual techniques

Last week I picked up my Bear & Fish embroidery again and started stitching a bit of the Bear's sweater. I'd rather stitch colorful flowers, stormy skies or furry paws but the bear needs a shirt too. First I was planning on doing my usual long and short stitch and shading, horizontally following the shape of the bear's arm and body. But then I though I'd add a few vertical stitches on top of the horizontal stitches. I think they give the shadowy areas, from a distance, a lovely blurry almost oil paint effect…

… and a textured look when seen up close.  Not a technique you will find in an Embroidery Handbook but it works for me!

Bear & FIsh update

I really missed working on my big Bear & Fish project. Yesterday I added some tiny berries and coloured in some more of the rose. I also started filling in some empty spaces in the background with 'moss' which actually consists of tiny French Knots in every colour green I could find in my teacup filled with floss leftovers!

I'm really happy with how it looks so far even though it is for from perfect 'technically', especially if you look closely. I'm now looking to pictures of waves and clouds on Pinterest for inspiration for the background.

Small steps

I spent some time with Bear yesterday and made good progress. As you can see I am not very bothered about leaving bits of the embroidery unfinished (like the rose). When I get bored or stuck at some point or other, I move on to something else. Eventually it will all get done, honestly!

Can you see the difference in shading between the larger piece and the smaller one? A large scale definitely gives more opportunity to make the shading look super subtle. From a distance anyway...Via my peeps on Instagram I got some great ideas for flowers to add to the Bear embroidery: Honeysuckle (so appropriate for a bear but a real challenge to embroider!), Forget-me-nots, Bachelor Buttons and Ivy. Let me know if you have more great flower/plant suggestions. I'm looking forward to include some of them in this piece!

I also had a rare visitor in my Embroidery corner today:

Just checking whether I needed help with that left over floss in the teacup...  ;)

Hey sailor!

A quick update of my Bear & Fish embroidery! While I was stitching the rose (just beneath the foxglove) I was thinking about putting Bear in a sailor suit (including a cute sailor hat). There is a Jean Paul Gaultier exhibition in one of our local museums right now and that's probably where the idea came from. I would need to do some unpicking of fur on the top of Bear's head and draw the new outfit  directly on the fabric but a sailor outfit would look really lovely on Bear I think. :)

No need for speed: Slow Craft

For some time I had a rather large embroidery (it's a secret project, more about that later this year) in my large Qsnap frame. Well I call it my large frame (it's 11" square I think) but they make them much, much bigger than that! But now that project is finished (well the embroidery bit anyway) I have put my beloved Bear & Fish project in the Qsnap again. Yesterday I added the green leaves. Not really my finest shading work, but it looks ok from a distance. :) I really enjoy doing working on this piece. It's not for a pattern, not for a book and there is no deadline, it's just for me! Which brings me to this blog post by Lisa. She did a fabulous job stitching this organic fruit & veg themed piece, and, just like me, she stitched it for fun.

To me it seems that crafters often feel the need to hurry or produce lots of things (for whatever reason: deadlines, new projects on the horizon, demand etc) and many (myself included) have several projects in progress at the same time. It's a paradox really: making things by hand (which is a relatively slow process) but it better not take too much time! Why not make at least one of your projects a 'slow craft' project*. Something you make just for fun or which will help you develop and practice new skills. Are you ready to be a 'slow crafter'? Or maybe you already are? Let me know!

*after I had written most of this post I found out that there is actually such a thing called the 'slow revolution' and 'slow crafts'!

Foxglove in stitches and an embroidery workshop

I managed to get a little bit of stitching done on my big Bear and Fish project around Christmas time. Deciding on what the best way was to embroider the Foxglove was hard. I tried different things, un-picked a lot of stitching but now I'm quite happy with how the Foxglove turned out.

While the stitching might look a bit frumpy and not-so-subtle up close, the over all photo gives a better idea how it looks in relation to the whole image.

Photo and Embroidery by Georgia Mc Donald

In other news: Claire over at Patch Fabric and Haberdashery in Lowestoft, Suffolk (UK) has an Embroidery Sampler workshop planned on February 23rd using my Princess and Abel patterns. Go check the details here. Unfortunately I can't be there myself but I have met Claire at the Fat Quarterly Retreat in London last year, she is a lovely person and I just know the workshop is going to be wonderful!

Within the next week or two I'm hoping to release a new pattern, I'm not going to reveal exactly what it is except that it is not too large and comes in three different varieties (all included in the one pattern). :)