Seven Months of Textile Postcards

 I've been stitching postcards along with Tori over at KoolKookyKreatures on YouTube. She gives us a prompt each month for inspiration. I shared a few at the beginning of the year but have slacked off since then. So I thought this might be a good time for a review and a reveal of the latest postcards. 😊

January's prompt was "Snow Day!"

 February was "Feathered Friends."

 March's prompt was "Time for Tea." I went with time for tea with Dr. Who. 😉

 In April we were invited to make "My Secret Garden."

May was all about "Faerie Tales." I went with flower fairies. 

In June we peeked "Under the Sea."

 And for July the prompt was "Wild Thing." A friend reminded me about Animal, the drummer in the Muppet Show band. Then I found these guys in my stash. 😁

 

 

  Now it's time for "Doggust." This should be fairly straightforward - I hope!

Postcards for the #Kookypostcardsal2025

 I have been remiss in sharing the textile postcards I've been making this year. You may remember this one for January's Snow Day! prompt:

February's prompt was Feathered Friends. I'd recently acquired a vintage hankie featuring a pair of machine embroidered birds so I used them as a starting point for my postcard.

 The prompt for March was Time for Tea. I'm not a tea drinker. Tea time isn't really a thing here in the States either. (The prompt originator is a UK resident.) It wasn't until I came across some Dr. Who prints in my stash that I was finally able to come up with a plan for the March postcard.

I called this one Timey-wimey Tea with the Doctor. 😁

April's prompt is Secret Garden. If you're familiar with the book or the movies you will know about the garden brought back to life behind a hidden door. That was just a little too obvious for me but I didn't have any other ideas until a conversation with friends in a Zoom call. One of them spoke of how love grows in our hearts. Bingo!

Hmm, I should have photographed it on a different background. Oh well. Lately I've been scattering tiny upright crosses to give texture to background areas. I enjoy the process and like the results visually. This postcard also gave me an opportunity to use some really tiny heart buttons I acquired somewhere along the way. The prompt for May is Faerie Tales. I wonder where that prompt will take me!

Warpping Up (in) January

 Our corner of the world has had a very mild winter up until this week. Suddenly we are experiencing below freezing temperatures overnight and well into the morning hours. There's even a chance we'll see a bit of snow in the next couple of days. I'm actually glad to have this change in the weather as it feels more appropriate to the season than what we've had until now. Still, winter has never been my favorite time of the year. 

The prompt for Tori's (KoolKookyKreatures on YouTube) postcard sew-along this January was "Snow Day!" I wasn't excited by this prompt - as you may have guessed. But I found some crazy patchwork I'd done all in white several years ago. That made for a great base.

I'd picked up that large applique somewhere along the way and it put me in mind of wind blowing. I used some bits of lace to create mounds of snow and a mini pom-pom trim along the top and bottom edges. A few snowflake sequins and a charm, some tiny white cross stitches scattered in the background, and I was done! I was pleased at how quickly it all came together once I got started. The prompt for February is "Feathered Friends." So far I don't have a clue how I will approach that one. Plenty of ideas, of course, but nothing in the planning stage yet.

The other project I've been working on this month is a little fabric book I'm calling "Just Ducky." It began with a vintage child's handkerchief. I folded it in half with a scrap of quilt batting between the layers to create the cover.

Inside I'm layering other fabrics and laces to create the pages. This is the third or fourth such book I've made so far. They began as needle books but are gradually evolving. This one will have a few pockets in it and a wool page that could be used for storing needles and pins but is less utilitarian than previous versions. (Come to think of it, I don't think I've shared previous versions with you. I'll have to make sure to do that soon.)

This is one of the embellished pages in "Just Ducky." And below is another.

When it is finished I'll share every page. I'm enjoying the challenge of working with vintage hankies. This is also giving me a place to use the charms and beads and laces I've collected over the years. It's about time I started using more of the treasures that have come into The Magpie's Nest! 

The Last Post of 2024

 In this final week of December I have managed to make the last two entries for my 2024 Stitch Journal project. Between the holidays and other things I wasn't sure that would happen. It feels so good to have created a stitchery for every week of the year. In the past I would have fallen behind and dropped out well before December. I make no promises for any year in the future. 😉

The first week of December Kathryn had us make assignments for each of the six sides of a die then roll the die and stitch accordingly. This was fun! My six options were couching, adding a patch, French or Colonial knots, chain stitch (or a variant), Spider web rose, and blanket stitch. In order I rolled a 4, 2, 6, 5, 1, 4, and 4 again. This is how it turned out:

I am quite pleased with this one. 

For week 50 we were to stitch some text. I had so many ideas for what quote or thought to stitch that I couldn't decide what to do. This one languished until today (Dec. 31). Frankly, most quotes were long enough to be intimidating. This is how I got around that...

 Week 51 was a stitched take on grid journaling. My journal pages are only six inches wide so my grid squares are only two inches each. Kathryn stitched her grid in black; I opted to just use a Micron pen to outline my squares.

And to wrap up the year Kathryn had us do some wrapping of textiles.

 I wrapped a satin ribbon off a small box of chocolates I was given for Christmas, a strip of denim off of my husband's jeans (including a bit of the hem), a scrap of muslin, and a piece of batting. The batting is wrapped with a specialty yarn. The others were wrapped with various weights of perle cotton. There's also a gathered/ruched piece of lightweight fabric (the bow?). If I hadn't felt the crunch of time I might have done more decorative stitching in the background on this piece and on the stitched text piece. 

Kooky's postcard prompt for December was Happy Holidays.

Once I found the "gifts" in a piece of quilter's cotton I had a lot of fun creating this one. 😀 

I'm currently thinking I will keep doing Kooky's postcard stitch along next year. However, I think I want to do more of my own work rather than whatever Kathryn has up her sleeve for 2025. There are quilts to be made too of course!

I wish all of my readers the very best in 2025. Happy New Year!

November Stitching

 It's past time for me to get you caught up on the stitching I've done for k3n's stitch journal project! 

To begin with, in the final week of October I couldn't bring myself to do the prompt as Kathryn presented it. She suggested we blindfold ourselves - properly prepared with threaded needle(s) and scissors at hand - and try stitching without being able to see what we were doing. Something deep inside rebelled at the very idea. So I stitched this instead:

The following week Kathryn introduced us to various embroidery stitches often found on kantha, the quilts made by women in India. 

And the week after that she gave us an opportunity to use those stitches (or as many/as few as we chose) the way they are used on kantha, to create a tree of life design or fill in animal or other shapes. 

The last week of November we were inspired by another embroiderer, Sue Benneton. She does something she calls wrinkle stitching. Crumple up a piece of fabric and then stitch on the creases. The next step is to fill in the negative spaces between the stitched lines. In the beginning it looks a bit like a map. However, I found that once I started filling in I couldn't stop!

 KoolKookyKreatures' postcard prompt for November was monochrome (working only in shades and tints of one color). I chose to work in a hue I don't naturally gravitate to:

Now it's time for December's postcard. The prompt is fairly straightforward: happy holidays. Hopefully I'll be back before next year to show you how I've responded to that one. 😊

Not Very Spooky

 Not only have I slowed down my blog posting, we've reduced the amount of decorating we do for Halloween. Which could be a sad thing except that quite a lot of "Halloween" decorations actually stay out on display all year long. 😉 

The prompt for #kookyspostcardsal2024 for October was "spooky cute." Not long after I began to think about what I might do I ran across a fabric sample from the late 1990's. It's a large checkerboard pattern with a border at either end featuring very American country toys. In and of themselves the rag dolls looked a bit spooky to me. I found a spiderweb print and then appliqued the dolls on top. From there I fussy cut a couple of ghostly shapes out of another print that is nothing but pairs of eyes on a black background. This postcard was primarily raw edge applique. I seem to be doing a fair bit of that lately. 

I couched the chunky yarn around the perimeter of the card to represent the dust bunnies one would find in an attic. Oh, and there's a spider charm in the web in the upper left corner. I'm calling this one Spooky Cute in the Attic. (I'm nothing if not literal.)

For the first week of the stitch journal project k3n taught us about enso, a meditation practice. This involves calming yourself, then drawing a circle without thinking about it. I drew my very open circle with a watercolor crayon. Wetting it then allowed the color to spread a bit. I stitched over the drawn line and then added other stitches as seemed appropriate in the moment. 

The next week we did some 'scrapplique.' Kathryn and many others made a butterfly image with two or more layers of fabric to decorate the wings. I chose to make a heart to celebrate Gracie's addition to our household. 

The theme for week 42 of the stitch journal project was "all of a piece." We were to take a single layer of fabric and pull threads from it to stitch with. Kathryn used a piece of linen with larger threads and a coarser weave than anything I could find easily in my stash. I ended up using a piece of muslin. 

Part of the muslin was dipped in tea to provide slightly different color threads to stitch with. I pulled my threads from the other side and stitched where the tea stained the cloth. The threads from the muslin were so fine I had a hard time seeing to thread the needle. I did not enjoy stitching through the single layer of thin fabric either. It's an interesting concept though, to use the threads pulled from your cloth to stitch back into it. 

Last week we explored stitching for the senses. Various textures of fabrics of course, but also paying attention to the sound of the thread going through the cloth, any scents embedded in the scraps, etc. 

In the upper left corner I have a piece of huck toweling that had been dyed in a tea that left a faint scent behind. Just below and underneath it is a strip of paper ribbon. I played with a few French knots and a tiny bit of turkey work to create more texture. Felted wool is the foundation for this piece, and the green square dead center is another bit of wool. There's a lot to feel when you close your eyes and run your fingers over this piece. 

As I write this I am debating what to do about the prompt for this final week of October. Kathryn has invited us to blindfold ourselves and see how we can stitch without sight. With appropriate preparations I can see this being a very enlightening experiment. Unfortunately, my gut reaction to this prompt is one of fear. Not of stabbing myself or anything like that. I don't want to make myself that vulnerable, even in my own studio space. I don't understand entirely where this is coming from. I do suffer from a degree of PTSD; maybe that accounts for it. In any case, I need to decide how to address this in my journal. I could write on the page where the stitchery would go, explaining my reason there's no stitched cloth there. Or I could just stitch something else altogether. I haven't yet decided what I will do. In the meantime, those of you who celebrate, have a happy Halloween! 

June Wrap Up

It's not quite the end of June as I write this but I have finished a few things and want to share before I forget. 

I'm very pleased with the postcard I made in response to the #kookypostcardsal2024 hosted by Tori Chatfield at KoolKookyKreatures on YouTube. The prompt was Yellow Brick Road. I confess that I struggled with this prompt, obvious though it was. Finally, as I was waiting for sleep to come a few nights ago it occurred to me to piece 1.5" bricks of yellow to create the road. That didn't seem like enough however. Eventually I hit upon the idea to put Toto, Dorothy's dog, on the yellow brick road. My attempts to create a template for Toto failed miserably - no surprise there as I never have been able to draw a recognizable shape without the benefit of graph paper. Hubby located an image from the original illustrations in the book and print it out for me in several sizes. This is the end result:

I added the sequins for a bit of the magic of Oz. 

The first week in the stitch journal project was an opportunity to play with blanket stitch. This was more challenging than I expected. I've become comfortable with doing the blanket stitch over straight lines and edges. This approach was more like working backwards to my mind. It certainly gives a cool result though.

The instigator of this stitch journal project, Kathryn at k3n.clothtales, celebrated her birthday early in June. My birthday happens to fall in the middle of June. To celebrate still being crazy after all these years Kathryn had us crazy piece a block one week and then embellish it the next week. I've dabbled with crazy quilting in the past but for some reason this block did not come easily for me. 

It was time to dig up the fabric booklets/bundles we'd buried at the spring equinox during the week of the summer solstice (here in the Northern Hemisphere). I'd put this scrap of crochet on the cover of my booklet...

And stitched this phrase inside.

I wrapped this up with bits of a pinecone, onion skin, and a sprig off our arbor vitae and then bound it with twine. The bundle went into the ground under the arbor vitae. This is what I was left with after carefully unwrapping the bundle and rinsing it well.

The crochet seemed to have disappeared entirely. The onion skin and the pinecone have left color behind. The twine was very fragile and in pieces. My stitching, done with plant dyed threads, is mostly intact but very faded.

To add this to my journal I carefully stitched it to a scrap of vintage hankie. Kathryn encouraged us to just respond to our cloth with stitches in whatever way felt right. Mostly I just tacked down raw edges. In a couple of places I stitched over tears with herringbone stitches or cross stitches. There's one small patch of needle weaving. I couched bits of the twine in place as well. This was a pretty cool experiment. 

Finally, in this last week of June Kathryn gave us the opportunity to make a single large hexagon (relatively speaking) for a quilt as you go project. The idea was to bind the edges of the hexie by folding over the backing piece of fabric. Then you have a smooth back with no stitches evident and you can whip stitch the hexies together to create whatever you choose. She was also inspired by Jeri Bellini who is doing a dot a day with stitch. I knew that binding would be too fiddly for me so I have blanket stitched the perimeter of my hexagon. 

While I admire the look of hexagons and what can be done with them I do not enjoy the process involved in making and using them. 

I have also assembled the huswif/treasure book I've been working on for a couple of months. I will do a separate post about that so stay tuned!

A Quick Stitchy Update

Tori's (koolkookykreatures) postcard stitch along prompt for February is Zodiac Mind Warp. That really threw me for a loop. Tori said we could use anything from astrology to astronomy. My mind went first to the Chinese year of the dragon but I didn't feel up to stitching a dragon. Nor did I have any dragon imagery on fabric that would fit into the 4" x 6" format. When I turned to astronomy I came up with something I could do:

Sirius, the Dog Star. 😁 The background is a single piece of quilter's cotton (with sparkles!). Sirius was cut from another print, laid over a piece of felt, and then blanket stitched in place. Simple but effective. 

The theme for week 5 of K3n's weekly stitch journal was "Hidden Histories, Untold Stories." This was from a show catalog from an exhibit in the Victoria & Albert Museum. Kathryn used English paper piecing to make a single flower shape. Her templates were cut from copies of old letters or documents, thus the hidden history. Hexies to fit onto a 4.5" square was too fiddly for me. I chose to use a layer of feed sack cotton over a handwritten synopsis of my family's history. There was a hole already in the fabric, which I stitched around to create an eyelet. Then I made a couple more holes and stitched around them. I basted the fabric onto my paper, hiding most of the history (more than I intended as it turned out!). 

English paper piecing speaks to Kathryn's English heritage. My ancestors were all laborers, mostly working the land. I feel like the feed sack fabric speaks to my heritage. 

For the first official week of February Kathryn invited us to work with those types of fabrics that can be challenging: anything slippery, sheer, ravelly, thick, etc. She encouraged us to "listen to the fabric" and work intuitively. I found a piece of satin, a couple of silks, a velvet, and a loosely woven scrap to work with. 

 There were tears in that blue silk. I just tacked them down with a matching floss. That green velvet moved as I cross stitched it in place. I decided to leave the scraps in the shape they came to me rather than trimming them. The tan woven scrap covers up a gap between the velvet and the yellow satin. Another piece of silk was stitched on top. Then the sheer with the turquoise rectangle went on top of the yellow satin. Finally, I rolled a narrow strip of organza and couched it in place. I'm pleased with the result. Surprised, actually, that I had that wide range of fabric types that fell into a cohesive color palette!