Erica; 120; Sentiments In Stitches

There's something about stitching with a message that gives your work a very special importance. The fact that you've taken trouble to stitch the words in gives them even more meaning somehow or other. I suppose it all started with some play as when children were taught their stitches and the alphabets and their minds were improved at the same time. Here's a lovely little old sampler where the child who probably was quite young had to do half of it twice over. You see it says A A B B C C D D. And besides that she had to embroider the little words. Youth is the season for improvement. My favorite song is one which reads. This was done by Mary Pitt who hated every stitch of it. But here's a beautiful one with all kinds of flowers around the border. The alphabet in black in the middle and a little bit is

the lofty trees though as so great the plants the flowers and vines the useless head beneath our feet speak a hand divide. Well I don't think the Habs are quite so useless as obviously she didn't because she embroidered beautiful wildflowers all around the border and her own little house at the bottom. I just adore wildflowers I suppose it started when I was 7 at school and we were all dragged out into the fields to gather great armfuls of flowers and come back for flower naming competitions and all the wood such as Rose Bay Willow and purple loosestrife birds foot Trefoil and cranes Bill just household words to me so I thought it would be fun to do Shakespeare's poem about flowers and spring which comes from Love's

Labour's Lost and illustrated with the flower when daisies pide and blue and Lady smocks all silver white. And cuckoo buds of yellow hue to pink the meadows with delight. I had such fun embroidering this blue denim because the flow is so so lovely in color to work out. But the Venice was quite difficult because I tried it in white and then decided the best color was a cream color so I had to unpick it all. The reason is that it has to melt into the background a little to give a lacy border to the whole design. You see the light has become an integral part of the design and hardly looked like yet has a toll. But I did them in the best stitch for lettering which is back stitch because you get such a beautiful

fine line and you can make the lattice as legible as possible and the best way to go about doing that is to trace the leftest onto all draw the lattice onto graph paper so that you can get them accurate and then chase them onto tracing paper pinned that on to your material and stitch right through the paper. Then when you finish stitching you can tear it all away afterwards and reveal your perfect lattice. If you have made a slide well then you can adjust it without any marks on the fabric. Back stitch is really just like the sun's come up and go back into the same hoe. I'm using huge wool to show you. You will be using by no will so it won't tear the paper quite as much. But even if the paper does 10 it doesn't matter because you're going to remove it too and you

have to do this on a frame because the paper would slip about too much and it's much more accurate. If you stab your needle straight up and down you can go right into the whoa that's made by the last stitch up on the back. And bad if you made four little stitches on one of the W.. Try to make for a mole on the next one. So the letters will be balanced. Back stitch is particularly good for these upright letters because it has a sort of stiff straight quality about it. I'm not quite sure what Daisy's pie means but I think it means their little round faces were scattered about

in the green grass. I wonder if it has any relation to pie eyes. Two more stitches. And the great moment will come. Be able to see whether my last reading was accurate or not. Pin it and tear away the paper. You may have to scratch it a little bit with the clothes line. It's a pair of scissors but it really looks pretty good. And as I said the beauty of the whole thing is if you have made a slight error you can just undo that letter and move it over without any terrible marks on your embroidery. Well perhaps you'd be so proud of the work when you finished it that you'd like to sign

your name. And I think the best thing to do is to just take a pencil and write as though you were signing it on paper. You can race if you're using Lynn and you can use an ordinary eraser only it should be a clean no and then. But I think you get a more accurate and better signature if you do it straight onto the embroidery with a pencil and a script lettuce like this. Split Stitch is a good one to use just like its name. Split right up through the stitch and go down ahead. It's like a back stitch but just splitting it and you go down ahead and split up through it. You see it does make a very nice line. You have to take very tiny stitches and push it with your finger as you go around the can.

That's the beauty of the stitch that you can push it stab it in the place that you want it to lie with your needle and it will stay there because it split. Here is how it looks when it's finished. And of course who can do it in any thickness of thread a single thread can be split right in the middle. I don't think that you have to split right between two threads you just come up into the general mess of stitches and pull rather firmly. Well this is a season for the timely aspirin. Whether it's some other winter and I spent last week in bed too sick to go out but not sick enough to be sitting all day in bed sewing away while I was waited on hand and foot by my family. You can arrange that too if you are cunning about it. While I was in bed I

worked on my favorite Beatrix Potter story. The story of Johnny town mouse. He asked to meet Willie the country mouse and he's you know he got stuck in a hamper of vegetables that was being taken into town and he ate some peas and then fell sound asleep in a pea pod. So I thought the best that I could write around it was happiness is having a very special home of your own. I did that in backstage and all to me Willie and the peapod and the peas worked in long and short stitch. And here's the companion piece to me Wally who was taking shelter under an astonishing leaf in the garden. The rain had just fallen and all the little pinks on this side a squashed flat by the rain. But the pansies is still smiling happily and it must

smell delicious because I'm sure that's why to me Willie has got that expression on his face. So I wrote. Happiness is sunshine after rain in a summit in backstitch. Now you could take care of this and write it on one side and do the illustration on the other side. Or you could make your embroidery bow to this and write the poem in the center. There are all kinds of ideas. Of course those designs that you've just seen were done with the first and the embroidery an integral part of the design complementary to one another. But then just the kind of sentiments in stitches that ran it the sentiment makes up the whole design. I'm sure there's nobody in the world who hasn't seen those. Some say Home sweet home in cross-stitch which used to hang in everyone's living room.

Well here is today's fish. My daughter hangs this on her bedroom door more often than not I may say she did it in cross stitch in quite coarse stitching on a very coarse red linen. The best way to go about it is to count the stitches and work them on graph paper first because that will save you a great deal of unpicking. Well I tell my husband and daughter loose on the subject of love. And they came up with two completely different designs. My daughter this is rather Victorian and sweetly pretty in pink some greens and yellow. My husband says Well V E and the V and they join together to form a dove. So it says Love and Peace at the

same time and I think it's an awfully clever design. You could really do it in needlepoint or as I did on velvet with chain stitch and stem stitch to make nice crisp outlines first and then I wet the stem stitch in blue then went around in magenta and then in shocking pink the way I felt it. Well this little pillow is really so simple and rather delicate in feeling so I thought instead of the silk which I used. You could work it on felt which has almost a velvety look. The stitching of the lettuce is just satin stitch that really common or garden over and over stitch which is so easy to do. If you stab a needle in an embroidery frame because you'll be much more accurate but sometimes even on a

frame it's hard to get the edges absolutely perfect and have stuck out a little bit. So when you finished take a black thread and outline the whole thing in stranded. Embroidery floss or cotton that covers up a multitude of sins and it really is part of the design because these little black tendrils go all around the lettuce stem stitch is just. Going coming out into the very back of the stitch like back stitch again but this time the thread to one side. Backstitch split stitch and stand all very closely aligned stitches. In fact. If you just make it plain. But then. Nearly finished. I think it would make a marvelous Valentine's present. But.

Anyway. Love is acceptable at any time. See you soon.