My next activity for the C&G course was reverse appliqué. I’ve done some on the machine before, but not by hand. Instead of just basing the design on one of my images of lines I decided to make something a bit more challenging. My first place to look for inspiration was the book 1000 Patterns by Drusilla Cole. I’ve mentioned this book before on here. It’s a book I am always referring to. The chrysanthemums in the Japanese section first caught my eye, but then I saw the daffodil in the index. As they are my favourite spring flower and are just starting to come out here in Frankfurt (but not yet in Schmitten!) I changed my mind. Here are my first sketches from last weekend:

During the week I did some browsing around the web and came across these drawings of daffodils. These were another source of inspiration. I also came to the conclusion from looking at some stencils on the web that my original sketches were too complicated. I was fixated on making lines with the reverse appliqué instead of shapes. Having realised that, my final design became much easier to sew.

Here is the finished design:

When my final sketch was finished I realised that I hadn’t really left enough space between the shapes for the edges to be turned under when sewing. So when I traced the design onto vellum to make my template I moved them all out a bit to make room. I used a 2B pencil to trace the design onto the green fabric. I prefer using pencil to the coloured marking pencils. It washes out well, takes a good point and they are a darn sight cheaper than the “quilters marking pencils” I usually don’t have trouble seeing the pencil lines on most fabrics.

The actual sewing went quickly. I was finished in one evening. No thick paint layer to get the needle through!

And here’s a view of the back so that you can admire my stitching

I spent quite a few evenings this week hand embroidering the edges of the leaves on my broderie perse piece. It was quite hard work sometimes where the acrylic paint was quite thick and I ended up with a blunt needle.

Originally it had been my intention to only use one half of the background fabric but when I saw the photo up here on the blog I decided that I liked the effect using the whole piece of fabric. It needed a little something to balance the 2 sides and as I had one leaf motif left over I put that on the right hand side. To make it a little different I added some veins to the leaf in stem stitch, again using 2 strands of stranded embroidery thread.

Here is the whole piece with all the embroidery finished:

And here are some details:

I like the finished piece so much that although I’ve done all that was required for the activity on the C&G course I think I will bat it and quilt it too. This one is a piece that is more than just a sample. It wants to get finished.

A tiny picture in the latest GEO magazine caught my eye. I’ve seen pictures before of the art of Deborah Sperber composed entirely of spools of sewing thread. It really is quite extraordinary. I can’t begin to imagine how you go about assembling the huge numbers of cotton reels needed to produce the finished works. I guess there is a lot of planning that goes into the production of each art work.

You can see photos of the works here.

The art works brought to mind a large piece of pavement art we saw on one of our trips to Salamanca to learn Spanish. It was a large cirular piece which also had to be viewed through a special viewing lens to be seen properly. Unfortunately it was too difficult to photograph being under a pergola tent and surrounded by crowd barriers, so there is no photo to post.

Over the last week I have been following the debate on the Guardian newspaper website that has been triggered by the publication of Delia Smith’s latest book “How to Cheat at Cooking” and her new television series on the BBC. The most amusing article was the Delia Taste Test. The whole debate has since been taken up by more of the dailies in the UK.

I’ve never seen Delia on the TV. My first introduction to Delia Smith was when my mother-in-law gave me Book 2 of Delia’s first BBC Cookery Course. I was hooked and bought Book 1 and Book 3 too. My mother-in-law continued to be a big fan and bought most of her cookery books. I have them all now and they do get used a lot. The reason being that the recipes are interesting, don’t contain a large number of impossible to obtain ingredients (here in Germany) and are quite healthy too. Although her later books did start to contain “exotic” ingredients that were not so easy to find here.

So I have to say that my sentiments do echo those being put forward by the majority of commentators. I feel cheated too. I just can’t imagine how horrible tinned fried onions must be. And tinned mince takes me straight back to childhood holidays abroad, where the high price of meat compared to the UK, meant that my Mum took tinned meat with us for our meals. We were either in self-catering flats or later in the caravan. It was ok as a compromise - spend the money on travelling and entrance fees rather than on expensive food, but we never ate the stuff at home and I really wouldn’t want to start now and not just because in the meantime I’m an almost vegetarian

When I started module 3 and was looking at the activities that were coming up, I thought what a coincidence it was, as I had just been reading about broderie perse at womenfolk.com. It is one of the techniques I am learning in this module. Take a look at the article at womenfolk.com to learn something about the history of this technique.

Well this weekend I started the activity that is a modern form of broderie perse. First of all I stamped some leaf motifs onto fabric using acrylic paint and my felt leaf stamps. I have often read that acrylic paint alters the hand of the fabric so I was interested to see the effect for myself. Here is a photo of the stamped motifs.

After they had dried the fabric did feel quite stiff, but as the next step was to iron “wonder under” or Vliesofix, as it’s called here in Germany, onto the fabric it really didn’t matter much. The bonding glue makes the fabric stiff too.

I had originally in mind to make a kind of autumn wreath on some yellow ochre coloured fabric from one of my dyeing classes. I pulled out the fabric in all the gradations and auditioned the cut out leaves. It wasn’t quite right so I though I’d try some of the various green fabrics that I have dyed. As I was looking for them I found the monoprinted fabrics from module 2 and one of those seemed just the right choice. Here is the current state of play:

I am now embroidering around the edges of the leaves in blanket stitch using 2 strands of stranded embroidery thread. I could have done it by machine as mine does a quite reasonable blanket stitch, but I felt like doing some hand embroidery. It is quite hard work though - getting the needle through 2 layers of fabric, acrylic paint and the bonding glue! I’ve done about a third so far and I do think it will be worth the effort. You’ll have to wait for the next post to see the results

One of my activities for the C&G course has been causing me pain. I was to take a shape and use it to create a design with bonded appliqué. At the same time I was to think about the colours I was using. In a previous activity I took photos of shapes around the house. I was really supposed to use one of these shapes but I wasn’t coming up with any inspiration.

I still hadn’t any idea what I was going to do for this exercise when I saw a photo in a magazine of an elephant in India wearing ceremonial garments. Part of the design on the robe was using the paisley motif. So I thought I would use that for my shape. Then I had the idea to use one of the pieces from the previous modules as my background fabric. I thought of the piece with the curved piecing. When I pulled it out I saw the 4 petalled motif on one of the fabrics and realised that this should be my shape. So I traced the shape off the fabric and made templates of the larger and smaller shape. As for the colours I picked out the gold of the printed design to use for the shapes. I cut them from some hand dyed fabric scraps that I had. The red one was originally going to be green, but that didn’t work so it became red!

As the motifs are quite small I used a narrow zig-zag stitch for the outline. I have used other decorative stitches on my machine on projects but they would have been too wide here. I originally outlined the yellow shape with the red centre with red stitching, but didn’t like that effect either so I ripped it out and replaced it with yellow.

It was quite a tortuous path to get to this result but I like the finished result and like the fact that I was able to do something more with the curved piecing sample.