Reve, Author at ReveDreams.com

White stripes

Or something of that nature. The August CAL theme on Ravelry was stripes, and the Amigurumi Army mission was monsters. I got really into my stripes project and finished it very early in the month, and didn’t finish the monster until the last weekend.

The stripes project was inspired by my tendency to take partially-cooked oatmeal to work some mornings. What does one do with it? I have some Pyrex bowls with lids, but I don’t want to tip them sideways to put into my regular bag, nor put the warm bowl in my cold lunchbag. Hence, I had an excuse to craft a made-to-order bag. I had been wanting to try out a spiral tutorial I dug out of the Internet Archive ages ago, so in three autumn colors, that became the bottom of the bag. Then I continued the spiral theme around the sides, and put the whole thing together and added handles with an accent color.

The spiral started out kind of awkward, at least the way I interpreted the directions. It smoothed out, though, and I like the way it looks a few rows out from the center. On the sides, I tried to do the same thing in terms of stitch height, with one round per color of sc, one of hdc, and one of dc, then back to hdc and sc. The finished product is slightly larger than necessary but fits the bowl reasonably well.

Now for the monster! He is gangly and gibbon-like.

I put magnets in his hands with the intention that he’d be a kind of emo monster and hug his own knees, but when he was finished he revealed that instead of being emo, he’s a monster with no sense of personal space.

Stumpy is not totally certain about this development.

The monster was freehanded, though I made some notes so the arms and legs would match. His body is basically a bowling pin, and the arms and legs have some bend to them via increases and decreases. I believe for the arms the first row was just sc across the chain, but after that I made 2 sc in each of the 2 centermost sc for two rows, then decreased twice (in the four centermost sc) for two rows, and maybe sc’d across once more before sc’ing the strip into a tube. For the legs I made 2 sc in the ends of each row and 3 sc in the centermost sc, in every row including the first one, for three rows, before doing the reverse for three rows (I used Lily Chin’s slip stitch-like decrease to decrease by three: pull up a loop in each of the next three stitches, and pull the last of those loops through the previous 2 and the one that was on the hook to begin with) and finally, again, sc’ing the strip into a tube. I stuffed him lightly, sewed the outer end of each limb closed (with the magnets in the ends of his arms), and sewed the other open end to his body. Though the yarn was already fluffy, I pulled up the nap to extra-fluffify him with a pet brush.

Straight stitches

This week’s installment of the embroidery sampler covers running stitch, backstitch, and variations thereon. These stitches somewhat unnecessarily take up two panels of the embroidery sampler.

Properly speaking, straight stitch is an isolated stitch. Anything that involves only bringing the thread up at one point and taking it back down at a nearby point, far enough to make a dash. When you do this repeatedly at regular intervals, it is called running stitch. Running stitch looks the same on the front and the back, although offset by one stitch length. The back is shown mostly to give you an idea of securing the loose end of the thread.

Backstitch is slightly more complicated, but not too much so. In backstitch the stitches are worked in the opposite direction from the one in which the line grows: stitching right-handed, the line grows to the left, but the stitches are laid down left to right. The opposite is true when stitching left-handed (though again, take this with a grain of salt, since I make my stitches any which way – I think it is easier to put the needle through pointing from your working hand toward your nonworking hand). Come up through the fabric, back up one stitch length, put the needle through to the back and bring it up to the front two stitch lengths away.

The back side of the fabric has stitches twice as long as the front, doubled but offset. Working backstitch “upside-down” and carefully you get stem stitch. Here, the stitches are twice as long on the front as on the back. What makes this different from backstitch worked on the wrong side of the fabric is that the overlap keeps the new stitch on the same side of the old stitch. Some sources will say it is stem stitch if each new stitch is above the previous and outline stitch if it is below but I can’t imagine that mattering to anyone who wasn’t competing in some esoteric embroidery knowledge contest. These stitches are laid down in the same direction as the growth of the line (as the stitches on the wrong side of the fabric in backstitch are).

When the stitches become very slanted and overlap more and more, it becomes encroaching stem stitch and finally satin stitch, as on the right above, used to fill areas in embroidered images.

Split stitch is a relative of stem stitch where the overlap of stitches is very short, and the new stitch does not lie above or below the old, but instead comes up through it. Since I was working with two strands of embroidery floss I just came up between them. You make a stitch, backtrack just a little, come up through the old stitch, and repeat.

Holbein stitch is what you get when you double running stitch, offset so they form a continuous line.

The first picture also has an example of running stitch worked at irregular intervals, and straight stitch used to make a star. The second example uses three different running stitches, a variation on Holbein.

Finally, back to straight stitch proper, as it is the best stitch for drawing. The embroideries for my children’s book quilt use straight stitch as the primary stitch.

Somewhat unnecessarily, the green V stitches and the green 3-line stitches have names: arrowhead stitch and fern stitch, respectively. The others are just freehand, doodling with stitches.

Feeling Stitchy Stitchalong

Feeling Stitchy hosts a stitchalong each month, with different themes. Often it’s a pattern that everyone embroiders in their own way. This month it was about embellishing printed fabric with embroidery. That’s something I’d been wanting to try for a while, so I went to Jo-Ann’s and looked at the fat quarters, picked out a black and white piece on which to embroider colored details, and went to work.

…except that project seemed insurmountably big and didn’t really hold my attention. I had given up hope on participating in the stitchalong until this weekend, when I was pondering the upcoming employee art fair at work. I would like to submit something, but the deadline is a week from today and has to include a photo of the piece. With nothing begun nine days before the deadline, what could I possibly accomplish?

Answer: a small art quilt. By small, I mean six inches square. The thoughts flowed while I ironed prewashed remnants Saturday morning, and while the original idea I pulled fabric for was not the one I settled on, I was decided by that afternoon.

Of course stitching didn’t start until Sunday afternoon. It was a perfect Irene-rain activity. The quilt isn’t done, of course, but here are the first two bits of embroidery.

I started with a fun tropical orange fabric with dotted-line drawings and just stitched along the lines and doodled in the open spaces. Next I chose a classic pink and indigo fabric and embossed its design.

The quilt is likely to include bits from the following fabrics as well: