Lazy sewing mounting

If you do a lot of crafts, you often have little projects that you did fairly quickly.  Whether it is cross stitch or embroidery or some sort of cool hybrid project, the work is finished but what to do with it?

Now the 'proper' way is to sew it to some sort of base or mount.  This often requires first hemming the edge to ensure it doesn't fray under tension.  Or if it is little enough to be a bookmark you could use hemming table to stick it to a base bit of felt.

But what if it isn't bookmark material or you want to put it up on a wall or in a frame?  Or you are like me and are too lazy to do the 'proper' way for something that is little? (I'm better on big stuff that takes years!).

So I have this little embroidery that needs to be mounted lest the fabric be wrinkly.

The first step is to sort the edges of the fabric out so they don't move or fray- particularly since this is two pieces of fabric with wadding in the middle.  So I got my sewing machine out and- just kidding.  This is a lazy job. Masking tape to the rescue!

Now for the board to mount the fabric on. Lots of two dollar/cheap shops now sell craft supplies and painting supplies and they carry canvas boards in a wide range of sizes from the very small (what I need) to very large (useful source if you want thick, non-bendy card for a project).  Even better, the shop near me had 50% off.  Score!

Your board should be at least 2cm smaller around for each edge to be able to fold the material over easily for taping.

Fold and tape over top and bottom.

Then the two sides.

If you are happy with things at this point, leave it be.  I found the edges were showing so I very carefully cut off the excess using scissors.  Don't cut too close to the front of the piece or the fabric will possibly fray on the front.

+

Then apply tape to protect the fabric and to stop anything pulling away.

And here's my finished piece.  It looks so much better than it did at the start!

Now I will say that this is strictly for small, minor projects.  I don't know how well it will hold up over years, nor do I know that the tape will or won't do anything to the material for a while.  A little project like this that only took a day or so (well I did it over a few weeks but that's because I don't get to craft as much as I'd like) is possibly going to end up as part of a card or just stuck in a corner, it's not exactly heirloom work!  If you have spent months or years on a project, it's worth spending the time and/or money to do or to get someone to do things right.

Hope this helps you do something with the pile of finished work- enjoy!

Hiding stitching on braids (and a dragon cross stitch)

I have a project that just needed a bit of gold braid sewn on in order to finish it off.  So I stitched it on and sat back to admire THOSE BIG WHITE STITCHES STICKING OUT LIKE A SORE THUMB!

Well OK, it's not that big but it was noticeable.  And there was already a dodgy area where a thread pulled when I sewed it up so I was feeling a bit miffed.  Then it struck me... I just need gold.  Not thread- metallics are often temperamental anyway and besides, I was feeling a little lazy....

So I broke out the gold pens and found the nearest match.  A careful daub on the thread later and...

I mean it is still there if you know where to look, but it is far less in your face.  As a bonus, I also added it to the end of the braid where the white core was showing:

It isn't a perfect match, but it is far less eye catching (and yes, I did go and do the other end after taking this photo!).  A word of warning though- I would be cautious if the object needs to be laundered regularly, you might need to keep the pen handy for touch ups
All that in order to make the final touches of this:
Teresa Wentzler's Delightful Dragon Fob

Those lines in the background are 1cm apart for scale.

 The main change I did with this pattern was to bring out the glow-in-the-dark thread to replace the ecru for the decorative stitches on the back (with the initials) and the background stitching on the dragon.  It is a very subtle effect- I find that the DMC glow in the dark thread is very faint, even when looking at it on the thread bobbin.  But it does glow and I know it glows, which is the main thing as it is stuck as mine now unless I ever met anybody who liked them and who had my initials!

Discworld cross stitch pattern

This is a project that has been on the back burner for more than the life of one computer- when I found my save file of my work in progress I had to search for software to install to finish it up!

Back when I was trying some miniature petit point pieces, I showed you a Discworldy piece I did on blue silk.  Well for the zero's of people who then contacted me about it, here's the pattern I created to make it.  Two versions since some prefer colour charts, while others prefer black and white charts.

Usual disclaimer too- I am not Terry Pratchett and therefore I don't own Discworld in any way, shape or form.  These are for fellow geeky fanart creators, not for anyone to make a buck off.

Mock up to get a feel for what it will look like

And if you do want to mount this into a broach fitting, then a useful tip is to make a paper template the right size to fit inside and use this to cut the cardboard backing that you wrap your embroidery around.

Green paper is my template, used to cut
the card to the right shape for the fitting

Can't show you a picture of the finished product- silly me forgot to do so before sending it only to my secret hogfather giftee on the Discworld forum.

Changing charted cross stitch designs

I've been on a bit of a cross-stitch kick at the moment.  And it was as I was finishing my last creation I realised that I tweak my designs more often than not!  That is to say, deliberate changes, not the 'oh drat, I put that stitch of green one space to the left... oh well she'll be right' sort of difference.

Exhibit A is by Teresa Wentzler, who I really really like (as evidenced by the three large projects of hers that I did before deciding to take a cross stitch break).  I love her dragons byt the original pattern used a lot of coloured swirls around the head and tail that just didn't work for me.  Plus I had to change the letters and phrase a bit as my first name was too long to fit easily.

Original design (from Patterns Online)

My version

I tried to take a photo of another unique feature but it was a bit tricky- I used a UV colour changing thread to make the hem and stitch the inner pages in.  The border is a nice matching blue in sunshine and a purple on the spine.

Original pattern

The second example was a cute little kit I got at a needlecraft shop just around the corner to my parents that I've not visited before.  It's a kit made byMill Hill called Christmas Jewels.  But when I first saw it I actually thought it was one of the old style hot air balloons (similar to what the Mongolfier brothers famously used in their first flight.

It was only when I opened it up to start it I realised it was a pointy Christmas bauble.  Oops!  A bit of scribbling on a bit of paper to work out in my head what I was aiming for, a bit of studying the pattern carefully and a bit of making it up as I went along and I ended up with this:

Full of hot air!

Making miniature petit point pieces

The piece that started it all

Many moons ago, I posted about a mini petit point broach that I deconstructed and made a pattern from.  And then did nothing else with for a long time.


Well in my holiday crafting mode I decided to do something about it.  I had some 40 count silk gauze that I had bought last time (that means there are 40 threads in each direction per inch in the gauze).  I dug it out, printed off a copy of my pattern and got started.

The first step was to create a frame to hold the gauze.  When doing cross stitch, I never bothered doing this as the tension in the stitches balanced out in my hands.  On the other hand, petit point is like half cross stitches- that meant the thread will always be pulling in one diagonal direction.

Because my pattern was  40 stitches across, I knew that my finished piece would be one inch (2.5 cm) across so I marked a 2 inch (5 cm) square to cut out on a bit of scrap cardboard

To stop the card from folding or tearing, I folded the sides over a few times and glued them down in order to reinforce the sides.  Then I taped a 3 inch square of silk gauze into place and got started.

Stitching was fairly simple. If you have done cross stitch before, you can do this.  The biggest  challenge was, of course, the scale!  Strong light is your friend if you try this!  Some sort of hands-free magnifier would also be advisable, but the only one I had was 2-4X magnification and between the awkwardness of it and the low power, it was fairly useless.

 I ended up making my original colour version and I am planning on mounting it in the original fitting if I can. 

One other thing I tried since I was on a run, was to dye the silk gauze using alcohol ink (aka a sharpie).  It worked really great, and I got to test another cross stitch design I've not posted up here yet...  This one was interesting as I tried a bit of backstiching in a lighter cotton thread (the designs were done with a single thread of DMC cotton), and the mountain of Cori Celesti was made using glow-in-the-dark thread.  Although suspect only I will ever know that since such a small amount of thread doesn't glow significantly.

What do you think?

Free dragon cross stitch pattern

Digging through an old back-up I stumbled on a few cross stitch designs I made years ago.  Fortunately, although they were made with PC stitch which I no longer own a copy of, a viewer is still available.  Since I don't want them potentially lost to time, I thought I would gradually work through and rescue these.  And since I have a blog, what better use than posting them here for the world to enjoy?

So without further ado, here's a cute little dragon head I have redone in KG-Chart.  Two chart types, colour and black and white so you can use whatever you prefer.  I have not test stitched this yet or dug my colours out so you may want to use my numbers as just a guide.  Basically you want four shades of green from light to dark (or whatever colour you prefer), a contrasting colour for the neck ridges and a red, white and black for the mouth and eyes.

Free for personal use, just don't steal it, sell it or claim it as your own.  If you find any errors or find anything confusing then let me know and I'll fix them.  And if you make one yourself, take a photo and send it to me- I'd love to see them!  Bonus virtual points if you play with the colours.

Mounting miniature embroidery

Another post in the Rose Broach saga...

The story so far.  Several weeks ago I bought a pretty little broach from a market of unknown age.  However it had unfortunate ugly staining on the side, probably old glue going icky.  When cleaning proved unsuccessful I pulled it apart to see if more drastic action would improve things.  With the embroidery removed from it's mounting I could also see what the original pattern colours looked like so made two cross stitch chart variants which you can find here. In this episode, I take the original embroidery and give it a new life...

Here's what I had at the start of today's post- the embroidery that I had cut from the mount and lightly trimmed the worst of the discolouration off. But I could not remount it in the original broach due to the size of the work now being much smaller- there needs to be enough fabric in the mount above to fit around the front of the mount (the domed round metal piece) with edges long enough to be able to tuck underneath and be held by the backing plate.

Solution?  I popped out to my local sewing supply shop and I bought some self covering fabric buttons.  These come in a range of sizes but for this work I used the 28 mm diameter button.  You can see that the materials for these have not exactly changed a lot.  Aside from size the domed pieces look near identical.  Only the backs are different materials.  The red and the yellow things are to help you mount your fabric in place- you'll see more on this later.

Because I wanted to have the embroidery centred on the button I first stitched a running stitch around the edge.  This meant that I could check the pattern was where I wanted it to be as you can see below.

Then it was into the handy red thing designed to hold everything in place (after making this button all I can say is DON'T LOOSE THIS or the rest of your button blanks (they come in a pack of 5) will be next to useless.  The red thing is made of a soft rubber that holds the material snuggly.

Those gathering stitches were handy though as they helped pull the material in from the edge.  I would suggest you do the same even if you have more edge material than I do.

Next step is adding the back- the yellow thing is the handy back holder that lets you press evenly to push the plastic back into the metal front, hopefully catching all the edges of the fabric at the same time.

Back view- sorry about the thread.  I was about to go to the next step before I remembered I hadn't taken photos yet!

Now this could be the finish point if you wish- all I did above was cut the shank of the button off with a craft knife so there would be room to glue a broach pin on.  This step is best done before you start but since I didn't think of it I just improvised and tried not to cut the material.  But the pin looks a little plain...

Front view

My solution?  I stitched seed beads around the edge of the button to frame it.  The great advantage of this method is that you don't have to try and find something the right shape and you can use whatever colours you like!  I choose a silver and black alternative frame as it reminded me of the original old silver backing, but this could look lovely if you picked colours from the roses or leaves or perhaps used pearl coloured beads.  The choice is yours.

Overall verdict?  Well it isn't perfect.  The design goes over the edges a bit so it doesn't have the white border to edge it to really make it pop the way the original had.  However, now you can't see yuck staining either.  The seed beads will also hopefully protect the edges of the pin from wear.  Since the edges are where the fabric will first rip and wear away due to rubbing it will give the embroidery a much longer life (the original pin had places where the fabric beginning to fray in addition to the staining).  And the backing piece will be used as soon as I can decide on what to stitch for it (hmm, same pattern or something else?)   Let's call it a good B+ which can become an A when I utilise the original broach backing.

What do you think?  Find these instructions useful?  Drop me a comment or an email- I would be THRILLED to know others are reading this blog and using the material!

Rose brooch cross stitch pattern

The original piece

Remember that old broach that I pulled apart?  Well I decided that it would be nice to have the pattern in case I damaged the original in my cleaning and deconstruction.  It turned out to be easier said than done- even blowing up the photo it was hard to see the stitching to reverse construct the process.  I also had the drama of finding some software to make the pattern in.  I used to have a copy of  PCStitch but lost the CD in a move.  Since this was for a small, one-off project I did not want to fork out lots of money on another copy so went on the prowl for something else to use.  I made the charts below using KG-Chart for Cross Stitch- they have a light version that is free that lets you create small patterns (for large you need to pay).  Overall I was fairly happy- the only downside was I couldn't seem to easily make a contained digital chart to post with both the symbols/chart AND the colour key.  I ended up having to do a screenshot to make the patterns below.  The screen colours also don't seem quite right for the DMC colours.  You can compare the lighter green colour in the leaves of the broach above and the pattern below to see what I mean- while the threads are a near perfect match, the computer pattern seemed to be a much darker colour.  But that said, the software did the job and was fairly simple to use.

So enough about the process, here's the pattern for you to enjoy.  It is not a perfect copy of the original as the small size and slight variation in colour fading means that it is more of a 'inspired by' pattern.  It also has not been test stitched yet since I'm still doing teaching rounds right now.   However, the colours (I used DMC embroidery floss colours) are as close a match as I can make them.  Click on the pattern below to see the full size version.

But wait!  Those who read my last post will remember that when I pulled it apart we got a glimpse of the original colours when looking at the back.  And as a comparison, here is the same pattern but this time I've matched to the back of the work- the side unaffected by light and wear over goodness knows how long.  Again DMC colours were used.

Much brighter, isn't it?  I also had to add an extra colour because, while the dark colour in the red and orange rose looked the same from the front, they appeared to be different shades from the back.  The green leaves are also noticeable as the lighter shade appeared yellow from the front but was originally a light green.

Now my great decision is what to do with the backing plate- stitch up the pattern above or something different?  And do I use the bright original colours or the muted colours for that vintage feel! Have an opinion?  Drop me a comment below.  I don't do decisions well and can use all the help I can get!

Deconstructing a miniature embroidered broach

Several weeks ago I fell in love with a lovely old broach at a market stall at uni.  So despite the fact that the last thing I should be doing is buying things, it somehow managed to follow me home!  But it had a flaw that irritated me- there was a nasty stain around the edge. It's most noticable near the pink rose but there were a few marks elsewhere.  Close examination showed that it was due to a nasty seeping glue that had discoloured over time.

The broach after I attempted to clean it.  It is about 3 cm in diameter if you are curious.

When I got it home, I tried a few remedies to try and fix it- a gentle wash in warm water with a bit of detergent but no joy.  I then tried getting out the big guns- polar solvents.  This was a big risk- if the colours in the embroidery were not colourfast then I might find them bleeding everywhere and ruining the piece.

While the thread colours happily did not bleed, the stain did not move either.  I suppose I could've left as it was but I decided to take drastic action.  If you have a mint condition broach, I don't recommend the following- this one had already been repaired (the pin on the back was a modern one glued on to replace the original) and had the stain.  But be aware, if you have something with true value DON'T do the following!  I am not an expert- lovers of old things who spend weeks lovingly restoring things would probably be horrified.  I tried to treat the broach with respect but old glues meant that there was a certain lack of finesse in the following.

I decided to see if I could deconstruct the broach to either fix the embroidery if possible, or replace it with something I made myself.  Step one was to pry the backing place (flat metal with the decorative border) off the piece the embroidery was mounted on.  This had been glued down so a certain amount of prying was required.  They came apart fairly easily- the broach pin fell off due to a small amount of flexing, but since this had been glued on much more recently than the rest of the piece I just kept both to glue together again later.

The embroidery was mounted in a metal piece- it's hard to explain well.  The easiest thing is to probably look at the picture below.  An attempt to pry it apart was not successful as it was clear it was going to damage the embroidery so I resorted to using a knife to carefully cut around the fabric.  While this would mean the piece couldn't be remounted in the same broach, I felt it would ultimately cause less damage since it put less stress on the fabric.  Then I could finally separate the broach back- you can see the small dent in back piece.

A part of me wanted to find a signature or a scrap of paper in the back piece. It's a perfect little hollow space that would be awesome to put some tiny message into the future in that may or may not ever be seen again.  Now whether it should've been a posterity message 'this broach made in [insert date here] by me' or something to mess with future person's head 'Now look what you've done!' I'll leave as an interesting thought exercise to the reader.  Sadly there was no identifying marks, either paper or stitched into the border so the creator's identity will forever be a mystery.

Now while this has probably horrified any antique restorer, it has provided a great glimpse into how the piece was made in the first place.  The embroidery was stitched on a piece of off-white silky fabric with a even mesh light chiffon like fabric on top to provide the grid to stitch too.  It also provides a unique chance to see what the original colours are- I was very surprised to see the difference!

Here's what I mean.  Here is a photo of the front of the stitching on a black background.  To provide a colour comparison, I've included three DMC embroidery flosses: 334, 347 and 725 respectively.

And here is the back with the same DMC colours for comparison.

Much brighter, isn't it!  That's the colour that the original embroiderer intended- something bright and cheerful.  As for what I am going to do with a small piece of embroidery and an empty broach, well that's for future blog posts to tell...

Finishing a cross-stitch or emboidered bookmark (the lazy way)

Bookmarks are a common project for cross-stitch projects.  They are small, so those into instant gratification (or at least a lot faster than a massive design) and they can make useful little gifts.  But once you finish your work, how do you finish it off and make it look nice?  Even if you are the neatest stitcher in the world, the back of your work is going to look a bit messy.

Well to start with, it will depend somewhat on what you made your cross-stitch bookmark on.  In general, there are two options, ordinary material (either aida cloth or evenweave) or bookmark material (usually aida) which comes in set widths and is already finished on the long sides.  The Medieval garden bookmark bookmark used the later.  If you use the former, you need to finish all four sides

The downside of raw material edges is that it will fray over time.  The threads that run parallel with the cut edge only have to move a tiny bit and they are off the perpendicular threads and flapping freely in the wind.  This ends up looking a messy tangled mess which you don't want for your hard work!  One option is to deliberately fray the cut edge back a set distance (usually at least 1cm).  This means that the remaining parallel threads (relative to the cut edge) will have to travel a lot further to fall off.

Another method is to do some sort of overcast stitching to essentially tie the parallel threads in place.  An overlocking sewing machine, ordinary sewing machine or using overlocking hand stitch can all do this.

And there is the humble hem.  Or in other words, fold the fabric over and iron it to hold the fold in place.  My Medieval Garden bookmark instructions said to do this.  And since I had the ironing board out anyway (for a skirt I'm making- I hate having to iron clothes :P ) I dug it out.

Bookmark with top and bottom folded and ironed down (and then the edges folded under to have a neater finished product).  The felt is the right width for the bookmark but the wrong length so I cut it to size after taking this photo.

This project uses a separate piece of felt to make the back look neat, but if you were making the project up yourself you could plan on using a long enough length of material that you could fold the ends up to hide the back completely.  But there is still the issue of keeping the material there.

Well the instructions said to use a neat line of stitching.  But I hate doing plain hand sewing.  But then, inspiration struck!  I had some hemming tape squirreled away (it's great for making costumes quickly that only need to last a day or so).  It's essentially double sided glue that melts with the heat from your iron.

Cut the hemming tape to size so it covers your backing material.  For the bookmark below I also put a square under each tab at the ends of the bookmark to keep them in place.

Close up view- I ran three strips down the length of the backing and then a short strip at each end for luck

Carefully position your bookmark onto the backing (using a felt backing for this was great as the felt really caught the roughness of the tape).  Once everything is set, use your iron to melt the glue and set everything in place (10 seconds or so should do- if not, just iron it some more).

And that's it!  Five minute job, tops.  Extra tip, if you are like me and glue your back in place and THEN realise that you forgot to add the tassel to the cross stitch layer, it's much easier to separate the layers if you first iron them again to melt the glue.  Then once you've added your tassel, iron again to restick it.