CQ pillows

A friend asked me to make two pillow tops for her to give to friends. She even sent me a huge box of velvet scraps from Taylor's Cutaways and let me keep what I didn't use. That's including some of the velvet that she embossed herself with leaf and sea shell designs. She chose the color schemes, but other than that, she let me have free rein.

So I did some SRE sprays, and just had fun with the seam treatments. I don't usually work with such big patches, so I made my seam embroidery bigger than I usually do, and I did some whimsical motifs, too.

Rose SRE tutorial, part 2, the bud

Make a short straight stitch near the full rose. Come up at the point where you will want the tip of the bud to be...

... go down at the "hip".

Come back up at the tip end of the bud.

Wrap the ribbon around the straight stitch 3 times, making the first wrap the tightest, the second one a little looser, and the third one the loosest.

Go back down into the fabric 1/8th of an inch away from the straight stitch.

The finished rose and bud.

Add more buds if desired. Add a ribbon stitch leaf at the base of each bud, one going to each side of the bud, and then tuck some ribbon stitch leaves around the full rose. Add stems of twisted ribbon in a straight stitch to connect the buds to the rose. The rose and buds are done in 7mm ribbon, while the green is 4mm.

Rose SRE tutorial

I've had a couple of people ask about how to do the rose bud in the previous SRE pieces, so I thought I'd post some photos of the process of both the full rose and the bud. Here's how to do the rose. I learned this from the book Learn To Do Ribbon Embroidery in Just One Day by De Selby. This stitch is called the stem stitch rose in the book. It begins with a French knot for the center of the rose, and as always in SRE, don't pull the ribbon too tight.

Bring the needle back up close to the F.knot to begin the first petal. Basically you're taking a stem stitch here, you're just going to do them around in a small circle, leaving a nice soft bit of ribbon on top for the petals. A twist in the ribbon here or there is actually beneficial for this flower. The book says to come up on the inside of the stitch, closest to the flower's center, but I've been doing it on the outside of the stitch, and it works fine, too. Maybe one way or the other will work better for you, so try both.

First petal in place, now on to the second....

....and keep going around the circle.....

....until the rose is as big as you'd like it to be. As you can see, this rose is really nice when done in a variegated ribbon (as here), or with two colors of ribbon, as in the orange roses on the green moire a few posts back.

I will try to post the bud photos tomorrow!

And finally....

These better be the last two for the swap, so I will stop playing and start working on other things on my to-do list. I've got to say, they've all been a great learning experience with using the ribbon in the different sizes and adding threads and beads.

SRE, back to the flora...

Some rose sprays for the Grand Motif Swap....

and another photo album insert.

More silk ribbon embroidery and spiders

This is another patch of SRE for the Grand Motif Swap, a little spring lamby done in French knots. I was getting a little tired of the flora, so I tried some fauna.

Then we have the first block I've worked on in the Spiders and Webs RR from CQI. This block belongs to Gerry H. and I'm the first to get to work on it.

Close-up of my SRE rose vine and home of Miss Black, who is not a black widow because, as she says, she "has yet to find the right guy".

Hedgehog day????

I was just informed by my six year old grandson that someone told him that if the hedgehog sees his shadow, it means one more year of Christmas. That's a new one on me, how about you?

My rainbow

Your rainbow is intensely shaded blue, black, and violet.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What is says about you: You are a powerful person. You appreciate friends who get along with one another. You share hobbies with friends and like trying to fit into their routines. You are patient and will keep trying to understand something until you've mastered it.

Find the colors of your rainbow at spacefem.com.