Raising the Surface

What a good title - could be used for a book!

Yesterday was another round of pleasure! Christmas lunch for Wessex Textiles in a lovely restaurant in Wimborne. Great to see everyone and I was able to thank Ruby Lever for setting up and manning the Val exhib at the Harrogate K&S. I saw some pics on Julie's blog and it looked great.

Glad you're all enjoying WoW. I thought it was a goodie and I loved the Linda Westerman article and Ruth Lee's shoes. I hadn't thought of moulding Tyvek and can't wait to have a go. My next book is on mixed media stuff and I am having great fun with it - and I've only got as far as gesso.

Great that Aussie Jo has been found - thought we were going to have to search the outback.

Yes, technology is a pain, Chrissie - and we depend so much on it. We have always had a separate phone line for our fax and decided to keep it (even though we get very few faxes) as a back up in case the main line went down. When this eventually happened both lines disappeared and we discovered that we didn't have two lines - just two numbers and two bills! They swear they have fixed this, hopefully we will never find out. Fiona's phone should be back today. Relief.

I was going to talk about the cloaks for the Master of the Rolls doll which were a quickish make on the embellisher. I do like combining stitch with embellishing as I find it needs a contrast of surface to stop it being flat.

This motif is one that I've used many times. It came from a floral wall in the Alhambra, Granada, and I flipped and extended it.

I have digitised it and it pops up in quite a lot of my work. Stitched on felt, it can be cut out without fraying. When I'm in my workroom, I often have the sewing machine chugging away, stitching out some of this sort of patterns so that they are stockpiled ready for the time when I need a quick motif.

I left quite a good border of felt and embellished it to a foiled felt background. it made a good surface. The black surround gives the metallic stitch an emphasis it would lack if stitched straight on to the fabric. Of course, this kind of motif could be free machined in satin stitch, so it doesn't have to be auto stitched.

Here's a detail of a bag made in a similar way.

I'm off to have my hair cut and then over to Fiona to help her sort out her backlog of emails. Quiltwow is going mad at the moment, which is great. Won't be long now until the first full issue.