Super Saturday- Stratford and THE SUN!

Oh yes, the sun has finally made an appearance and has therefore significantly improved my mood!

A while ago I booked a free-machine embroidery course at Sew Me Something (www.sewmesomething.co.uk). It had taken so long to come around that I had almost forgotten about it. I left Mr Jones at home and ventured off to Stratford-Upon-Avon. Miraculously I managed to get there bang on time despite leaving late and missing the car park. There were a lot of people in costumes, I later found out that it was Shakespeare's birthday so there was a parade in town, sadly Mr Jones and I missed it but worth remembering for next year.

At Sew Me Something I was welcomed by Jules (the owner), Julie (the teacher) and about 6 other participants in the workshop.

We started with the basics of free-machine embroidery, followed by a play on the machines.

My practice embroidery - house, stick-man and penguin

After this we thought about the pattern that we wanted to create. I decided to stick with penguins and set about finding my fabrics and cutting out lots of oval paper templates.

Thinking about the layout and fabrics

The longest part was finding a suitable fabric for my penguins to sit on, I wanted it to be quite bright but also quite iceberg like- apparently this is a tough ask! Once I had settled on my fabrics and had all of my pattern pieces cut out I ironed the fabrics onto some bond-a-web and then cut all of the pieces out.

For the larger pieces of fabric I zig-zag stitched them on. I then ironed down the other pieces of fabric.

Ready for the free-hand part

No came the scary part; the free-hand embroidery. I found this really enjoyable and easier than I had imagined. If I was doing this at home I think I would have been tempted to unpick all of the lines which weren't perfect but as I was thinking about time, I decided to leave them and I am glad that I did because I think it really adds to the effect.

Progressing nicely

Having got to this stage I started to think about eyes. Julie made a fabulous suggestion to use buttons and Jules made it even better by suggesting that I sew them on with orange thread. This is the benefit of workshops rather than working by yourself; the chitter-chatter, the cake and the genius ideas! Julie kindly stapled my finished embroidery onto the frame and my work was complete.

Finished!

I ran back to the car (as my parking ticket was running out) with my penguins proudly on display!

Once at home I continued the crafty theme by doing some screen-printing in the garden with Mr Jones

Preparing for some screen-printing in the sunshine

Mr Joneses raven stencil

Trying with poster paint - not a huge success but OK

Trying with emulsion - just needs a stronger stencil

And then made a liberty patchwork cushion which Mr Jones had bought for me at Christmas but I hadn't found the time to stitch until now.

Liberty cushion

We finished the day, very happily, with a film and a curry!

Love,
Mrs Jones
x

Time flies!

Well, I am a bit embarrassed by how long it has been since I posted; this is the peril of getting a full-time job and moving house.

But, I'm back! I've just been looking through my old posts and it seems that I need to update a few of them now that I have finished, yes, finished, my city and guilds with the certificate to prove it. I also have a new workspace in our new house and I have made some progress on my challenges so there will be a few blog posts to follow.

Before that I want to share a few of the crafts that I have done recently.

Firstly: rag rugging.
This is my new passion, to add to the others.I received this book from the wedding list:

And was keen to try rag rugging but needed something to get me started, so I went to a workshop at Sew Me Something  in Stratford-Upon-Avon.



Where I met a lot of very nice people, had a couple of glasses of wine, got Mr Jones to collect me and started a rag rug cushion panel which looked like this when I brought it home:

Rag rug cushion pannel

A couple of weeks later I was the proud owner of a prodder and bodger:

and my cushion panel looked like this:

Finished rag rug cushion

I am very proud of it. It was so enjoyable that I soon followed it up with a festive wreath:

Wreath in progress

and I even made another one for my parents. I am thinking that I will do a wall hanging next but need a direction to start me off. The downside is that I now can't throw any clothes out as they could be cut up and used so the charity shop is not doing as well out of me as it used to!

Secondly: I have been hemming trousers that I picked up in the sale.

Thirdly: I made these great presents for my parents:

An egg-box 360:

Joke present for my parents

and a magzine holder for my mum as I had bought her a Mollie Makes subscription for Christmas.

One side of magazine holder

Other side of the magazine holder

That's all for now folks. My mission for today is to take photos of my C&G folder to upload onto here.

Love,
Mrs Jones
x