This is Ida, she is little girl, she stands twelve inches tall and is made from tea dyed calico to my own pattern. Her face is hand painted with acrylic and pencil crayon and then embroidered eye brows and eye lashes are stitched. Her hair is made of soft fawn wool tops which is hand stitched and styled. She has a wistful face, with one eye brow slightly raised as if she has just remembered something sweet and funny. Her checkered legs and the heart she holds are made from a lovely fabric by fairtradefabric.co.uk, always well worth a look for plains, stripes and checks. All cotton and all fair trade sourced. I bought the fabric for her dress at the Quilting Show at the NEC from a Japanese lady, all her fabrics were japanese and were quite, quite different in weight, style and weave from regular cotton lawns you see in the UK. I particularly like the rabbits. Her knickers and underskirt were made from my Uncle Jim's recycled walking shirt. It's a really robust fabric, wonderful to work with and brings a handsome texture to her undergarments, I would have liked another metre of the fabric or an extra shirt it was so good to work. But hey ho, you work with what you've got. I hope you like her, she has real character and would make a lovely companion.
Having had a very busy few weeks with Christmas orders, which is always great, I have spent a few days chilling out, reading and just sitting back. I can only do that for so long so I started drawing the trees that look so imposing in the wood to the back of our little house. The hues and changing tones of greys and blacks are just lovely this time of year. I had all these pencil and charcoal drawings of overlapping and intertwining branches and I decided to change my perspective and got a metal rular and a scalpel and chopped the drawings into 5cm square mini drawings. I then, with no reference to my original source selected one mini drawing and made a small hand and machine embroidery taken directly from the reduced image. I find the randomness of the finished embroidery and the small sample drawing rather endearing. It relies on simply differing texture and strong line. I painted gouache in greys and blacks onto some quaker cloth and then began to work randomly with the machine reflecting the texture in the drawing. I made some 'machine made cord' for the strong vertical, I enjoy making them and they always add a sense of dimension when used in any work. I hand couched them on to the piece and then worked other hand stitches into the machine stitch, mainly fly stitch. I also used some wool thread I had dyed using alkanet. This gives you a wonderful grey to black range nothing like any commercially bought thread. I really enjoyed making the embroidery, such a change from what I had done lately and I feel it really reflects some of the winter grey days we have been having here in Lancashire. I would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and hope that it is a peaceful and successful New Year for everyone. Best wishes.
