A Grad's Gift

As promised, here's a picture of the finished bag I made in honor of Harper's graduation. The ceremony was very touching and there were quite a few misty eyes in the audience.

Remember When...

Remember when I said I was going to turn my African Folklore Embroidery into a flap for a bag? Well, I did! And I'm so happy with it. I had really been stumped as to what kind of fabric I wanted to use for the body of the bag. Should it be some of my own hand dyed or a commercial fabric I already owned? I just couldn't decide and, also, nothing seemed quite right. Then yesterday, as I was driving to the fabric store to pick up some other stuff, it dawned on me. I wanted the body of the bag to be made out of a Japanese brocade. It just suddenly seemed to be the perfect mix. When I got to the store, it must have been kismet, because I found the perfect fabric in terms of color match. I just knew it was right the minute I saw it. I was so excited, I practically ran home and spent the evening making my bag and here it is:

I'm Still Here

I have been a very bad blogger this past week. Though, my husband says that he doesn't like it when people spend time on their blogs lamenting that they haven't posted lately. I'm not exactly lamenting, but, I do enjoy posting, so not having done so for a while is a bit of a bummer.
Today's entry is a bit of a cornucopia(whew, I didn't think I knew how to spell that). This is my completed, quilted and bound, on three sides, African Folklore Embroidery. I only bound it on three sides as I'm planning on using it as a flap to a book bag.I've also been dyeing and dye painting a lot of fabric lately and am planning to use most of the larger pieces to make bags.
Here's a view of the inside of the bag with an elephant peaking out from the pocket.

Class Photos

Since I mentioned teaching a class in African Folklore Embroidery, I thought it might be fun to post a few pictures of the kids in my class working on their pieces. My daughter(pictured above) also posted about the class in her blog, Fiction Fun .Here's another view of some of the girls hard at work.

Family Stitching

We've been doing a lot of stitching around here. Sometimes it feels like a scene from Little Women. We gather in the family room, take turns reading aloud and work on the embroidery kits we bought at Quilt Festival in Houston last November. I had actually noticed the kits the previous year and thought they were fabulous. At the time, I felt like I had too many projects going on to learn how to hand embroider, so I kept on walking. Since then, I've learned a whole host of stitches for a commissioned piece. So, this year, as we drove down to festival, I turned to my daughter and said," I hope that embroidery place is at quilt festival this year." It most certainly was there and it's called African Folklore Embroidery . Ordinarily, I don't think very much of kits. They remind me of paint by numbers. These "kits" are nothing like that. The images, which depict scenes from the everyday life of the Ndebele tribe of South Africa, are simply but beautifully drawn on black fabric. The kit includes a braid of thread, a needle and some basic instructions about various embroidery stitches. It's completely open-ended. You decide which colors go where or even if you want to stick to their palette of threads. You choose whether to add embellishments such as felt, beads, buttons, etc. I was so excited about these kits that I ended up buying three kits, one for myself and one for each of my girls.
We've been off and on working on our kits and here are our works in progress:This is Rachel's. She's almost done. I especially love the way she combined two different colored threads in the lion's mane and the felt ball that she cut in half, stitched to the surface and embellished with seed beads to create a three dimensional sun.
Here's mine. I too am nearly done. I've had a terrific time couching threads, adding bits of felt, and using both the thread provided in the kit and some wool threads from my own stash. I think I've even used some fingering weight yarn in this piece. I'm planning on quilting the embroidery and using it as flap for a bag. I can't quite decide if it will be a book/messenger bag or a backpack.This one's Abi's. She's actually just started working on hers. She is in an embroidery class that uses these kits. I came home super excited about these things and decided to offer a class at our homeschool co-op that incorporates these kits. Currently, I have six 9-11 year old girls happily stitching on their pieces. Also, I've proposed teaching a summer camp at the Art Pad that utilizes these embroideries.

Stitched Surface

In my last post, I mentioned that I could envision doing a lot of embroidery on the surface of the quilt. I was thinking about that and decided to post this quilt, because this is the first quilt I made where I experimented with densely stitching the top. I made this piece as a commission and initially was just going to piece and machine quilt it. At the time, I was learning a lot of embroidery stitches, mostly from Erica Wilson's fabulous book, Erica Wilson's Embroidery. This book dates back to the seventies and isn't exactly eye candy, but it is chock full of stitches and the instructions are very clear. Anyway, I used this quilt top as a sampler of sorts. Piecing the top only took me a couple of weeks, but all the embroidery ended up taking several months. I loved it though; both the finished product and the process. I found the stitching even more relaxing and meditative than knitting. And it too was extremely portable. I can't imagine doing that amount of stitching on most quilts I make because it is so time consuming, but I really enjoyed exploring this technique and am really looking forward to doing some more.