No, No and Yes

After settling the blackberry leaves into place yesterday I went searching for suitable fibre to stitch the stems. I picked out a couple of handspun wool yarns from my collection. Unfortunately they were both Navajo plied, which is probably part of why they called me--that rounded and slightly irregular look--but they were too thick for the task and Navaho plied yarn can't be unravelled, so I set those aside. Then I found a little bag of handspun silk threads which I'd made for a experimental piece. I'd designed them as embroidery threads and fortuitously they were in shades of purples and greens. Ah ha! Just the thing for some nice textured blackberries. There's always a catch--in this case it's the fact that I have very limited quantities of these threads. They're just leftovers from another project and I won't have time to make any more--even if I could come close to matching colours. So I'm carefully working across the design: dividing my threads in half and stitching from side to side so that whatever I manage will be evenly distributed. Then I'll see how far I get and sort out the rest accordingly.

Egg again

Our Colour Theory subject has two strands--no pun intended:)--one is mixing colours with paint, the other with embroidery threads. It seems that the sub-text is to make sure that we all have some basic skills in hand-stitching. We're tackling a couple of different stitches each week: seed and running stitch the first week, chain and blanket stitch this week. I'm not finding colour blending with six-stranded embroidery cotton very satisfying--especially not on such small samples. It difficult to get a real blend given the limitations of the medium. I keep thinking about how I could blend the colours using my spinning techniques or my dye pots, but that's not on the agenda just yet. Meanwhile, making a small, quick design using variations of only one embroidery stitch is an interesting challenge in itself.

More Coloured Threads

I've been stitching away at my colour blending samples. I'm doing both on a white background, so I've taken a quick snap of the thread scraps on a black background. I'm amazed at how much thread I've used on what are really quite small samples. I'll have to go off to the haberdashery department again today and buy a few more skeins. I think that this week's class will involve more colour blending. Our paint mixing this week was working on shades and tints, so I guess that's what I'll be stitching next week.

I managed to pick up a darning foot for my sewing machine at a ridiculously cheap price--another $1 bargain. If this week's homework is anything to go by, I can see myself wanting to learn the basics of machine embroidery, even if it's just to produce samples more efficiently. Then again, I can only imagine how that would open up another whole new world of possibilities . . .