It’s been a while since I did a ‘New to Me’ post but, despite appearances, I have spent some time in the Makery this month and tried out a couple of new things.

The first was inspired by something Fiona at Celtic Thistle stitches did a while ago. I say ‘inspired’ because I did this from memory and it’s probably not the right way to do it at all. It’s a sort of trapunto technique using strands of yarn. You can see the stages below. It’s an improved version of the golden hare I made last month. I started by stitching the outline, then cut away the backing fabric and, finally, threaded strands of wool into the spaces I wanted to be raised.

• 

• 

• 

• 

After that, I painted with gold, as I did last time, and hand quilted the background. I also tried some lettering. The letters are about 2cm high so it was a bit fiddly but I was quite pleased with the overall effect.

• 

• 

• 

Having managed to paint the edges fairly straight, I attempted some more ambitious fabric painting. I quilted larger shapes and attempted to fill them in with paint and you can see my straight line painting leaves much to desired! I edged the gold with threaded running stitch using metallic Anchor stranded thread, which I have never tried before and I found it reasonably easy to sew with (even through layers of paint, fabric and wadding) but separating the strands to sew was a trial. They kept tangling and I ended up having to tease them out one by one. Bizarrely, I also tried a silver skein and managed to divide the threads without particular difficulty.

With the other painted colours, I decided to leave the poorly painted edges as they were.

Lately, I’ve come to conclusion that sometimes you just have to go for the overall effect because getting too obsessive with perfecting details is a certain route to a UFO…

• 

• 

Something I couldn’t really leave, though, was an experiment to create a more water-colour-like effect. It seemed to me at the time that, however much water I used, the paint wouldn’t spread easily. The next morning, however, I discovered that, quietly during the night, a whole band had seeped past a line of stitching into an area that was meant to be unpainted :( I frogged the red hand stitching and then remembered there was a line of machine stitching under it. So I frogged the machine stitching and steamed and steamed to get the holes made by the stitching out but to no avail :( Eventually, I re-did the hand stitching, where the black frixon line is in the photo below, and added a strip of lace under it. If I had settled on doing that sooner, I could have left the machine stitching in but onwards and upwards!

A more cheerful New to Me was my garden when we got back from my daughter’s wedding in Rhodes. Before we went I had cut back lots of flowers (which were dead and hadn’t been great this year owing to successive heatwaves) for Autumn but whilst we were away it rained for a solid week and I arrived home home to an unexpected burst of colour.

Now we are back in GMT so the sun is in the middle of the sky at midday and the evenings are dark. All that bodes well for more time in the Makery. This year, that will be another ‘New to Me’ and a very welcome one :)

Janine @ Rainbow Hare

I’m linking this post with Fiona at Celtic Thistle stitches for ‘New to Me’