Sewing group project -- Holiday!

These rectangles have been waiting for completion since mid-2013.  It's another project from my fabulous and crazy sewing group.  Many of us have chosen the holidays as the theme of one of our projects.  I decided to do trees.  It could have been a single branch or even just the top, but everyone chose to do a complete tree.  The background is hand-dyed (by me) wool.  The thin black is velvet ribbon and the wider black is black wool.

Here are some close-ups.  Mine is in the upper left.  I used some rug-hooking techniques and various shades of green wool.  The tree is proddy using small strips of the wool.  I cut the ends at a point to mimic pine needles on branches.  The bottom is some glitter-infused velvet that I cut using a wool cutter and hooked just as you would wool in a rug.  The strands of metallic pop out randomly -- a nice bonus I didn't expect.  As usual, mine is one of the heaviest pieces!  An occupational hazard of using wool as your medium, I guess.

Next across is Anne.  Anne of the amazing embroidery and strategic use of sequins.  This design has great swirls and crystal and sequin accents.  I'd know it was Anne's a mile away.  Each year at the stocking contest, Anne's stocking is silk with fantastic appliqué and embroidery.  When her oldest daughter was dancing ballet, Anne did headpieces for the Akron Ballet.  Her attention to detail is unmatched.  I've learned many things from her over the years.

Heinke's is next.  Heinke is the master of never settling for the same old techniques.  Over the years I've seen her try almost anything to get the result she wants.  This piece uses wash-away stabilizer as a backing.  She free stitched using various green and metallic threads, loosely in the shape of a tree.  Once the stabilizer is washed away, all you have is the thread.  Pretty cool.  The red background is hand-dyed wool and she used some metallic thread to do a running stitch frame on the blue background.

Katie is another artist whose work I can instantly recognize.  She is a master of collage using found objects, odd bits of sewing supplies, and vintage materials.  This piece is classic Katie.  I love feather trees and this is certainly a great example.  Each tier of branches has a slightly smaller size of ornaments as you move up the tree.  Katie owns a fantastic clothing store in Hudson.  I wonder how many of these little bits started out as trim on clothing that Katie kept for her personal use?  Her house is full of eye candy.  Mini collections of embroidery thread and religious icons;  small framed bits of art from friends, textile fabulousness.  

On to the bottom row!  This one is Barb's.  Barb and Anne are sisters and our sewing group meetings always have an interesting depth thanks to having sisters in the mix.  Watching the two of them makes me miss my own sister who lives much too far away.  Barb is also a master of embroidery.  Our first year as a group, Barb did squares of silk with the most beautiful bird on a branch.  Each one exactly the same and so precise it would make you cry.  My embroidery skills will never come close to Barb's.  Her tree is airy and light and lovely.  The tiny beads look just like lights and I love how the trunk curves.

Beth is next.  Beth and Heinke are the two in the group most likely to use fabric.  Beth quilts and does massive amounts of sewing for her daughter and son-in-law.  Mark Cesarik is a fabric designer with great talent and Beth definitely makes the most of his creativity with her creations.  But, this tree uses new and vintage Christmas fabrics, probably bark cloth.  Beth hoards bark cloth of all types.  One year we used her bark cloth in a project.  On this tree, I love the second tier up from the bottom.  The large ornaments add so much movement to the tree.  Oh, and Beth is Jewish!  Pretty great stuff from someone that doesn't even celebrate Christmas.

Two more!!  Next is Angela.  You'll have to look closely at this tree.  The tiers are made up of ribbon and on that ribbon is printed pictorial instructions for knitting!!  How perfect for me!  When she gave this to me, I immediately found out where to get that ribbon and I ordered some for myself.  The creamy white and the black printing are the perfect foil for the red stitching.  This also shows why I chose that muddy blue for the background.  Almost every color looks great against it.  It's neutral without being boring and I love it so.

Last but definitely not least is Kathy.  I will take a tiny bit of credit for Kathy using wool in many of her designs.  But, beyond encouraging wool as a material, I obviously cannot help Kathy with anything else.  She is a master needlewoman.  This piece is wool appliqué plus embroidery.  Look at the little bird hitching a ride on the tree as Santa drags it away.  Look at the laces on his shoes!  Seriously fun and fantastic.  I put this piece at the lower right so it would lead the eye off the work.  

The entire piece hangs above the French doors in my house.  I normally hang my sheep there but now I will switch out the sheep in December in favor of my fabulous Christmas tree hanging.

Where have you been?

I'm embarrassed to see the date of my last post.  Truly I am.  My excuse is that it is baseball season here in Ohio (not that the weather has cooperated).  I have three boys, they all play, and I have anywhere from 6 to 12 "baseball viewing opportunities" each and every week.  Add to that 2 new perennial beds, 10 yards of Sweet Peat to spread, and you have my life these last 8 weeks.

My Vitamin D is in ample supply with all these outdoor pursuits but I have still been working a bit indoors.  These are tape measures that are embellished using recycled wool and vintage buttons.  The petals are hand-cut and then inserted using a proddy tool normally relegated to rug hooking.  I love Craft Crossover.  It's one of the reasons I am constantly trying new things.  You never know when you'll discover some incredibly useful technique.

I'm using these as teacher gifts this year.  The tape measures are the round ones with the push button to retract the tape.  I find them for $1 each at Hobby Lobby.  I cut 4-inch circles of two different wools, make a sandwich, and stitch it up using the zipper foot.  Then I take a scrap and cover the end tab of the tape.  Finally, I sew on the vintage button and proddy the petals, making sure the push button is on the plain side of the work.  Otherwise the button and flower would block the only means of retracting the tape.

I hope you enjoy.  Happy spring!

S is for Sunflower -- and screening

I think I've spoken of my sewing group before.  There are 8 of us and we do creative projects for each other during the year.  We've been together for 7 or 8 years and the things we have done are spectacular.  For the first few years, we had specific guidelines that everyone followed.  One year was color, one year was theme, etc.  The color year I chose blue and brown and asked for 6-inch squares in those colors.  The techniques range from quilting to embroidery to knitting to everything in between.  I think I'll do some blog posts in the next few weeks about past creations.

This year my personal theme is Sheep and I gave everyone a 9-inch square of hand-dyed wool with the instruction to do a sheep.  I've received 4 so far and they are great.

This sunflower mat is for my friend, Kathy.  Her theme this year is for all of us to use leftover screening from her porch repair and to use the screening as the base fabric for our creation.  The only other stipulation was that we incorporate the letter "S" in the design.

The minute I saw it, I immediately thought of rug hooking.  I tried out a few strips to see what would work and settled on a #6 cut.  Because the holes are so small, I had to use a small hook that I picked up at a garage sale one time.  Not my beautiful hook that I use most of the time.  And, once I tried out the hooking, I realized that this was not going to be as pleasant and relaxing as hooking on linen.

Screening is hard plastic and has zero give.  Even if I wiggled the hook around, I couldn't get the little hole to be very big.  I was also using a fairly loose weave plaid for the main color of the mat and the loose weave did NOT want to be cut in a narrow #6 cut.  The green fabric was great -- tightly woven and a bit felted but still very flexible. 

The screening scratched my hands and, because I had to use a hoop instead of a traditional frame, my pulling action was very awkward.  I did not enjoy.  I felt like it took twice as long because I had to grip the frame while I pulled each loop through.  The screening was also difficult because it's black.  So, I had to use some special transfer paper to trace out the "S" so it would look right.

The smartest thing I did, though was to hook a small circle at the top of the stem as a placeholder for the proddy technique I used to make the petals of the sunflower.  This worked perfectly and as I prodded the petals, I gradually removed the small circle. 

All in all, I like how it came out, but it was a pain.  However, below is the project Kathy did for me a few years back when I had everyone do a vegetable.  The 8 vegetables hang in my kitchen at our lake house and they are all fabulous.  Kathy did squash and I know this type of work takes hours and hours.  So, as I scratched my way through I remembered the incredibly beautiful work Kathy has done for me year after year.  She's worth the effort.

Life in an old house

I haven't talked much about my house.  It's old.  Built in 1836.  When I think about that, I'm in awe.  The Declaration of Independence was 60 years old.  Ink barely dry.  The Civil War hadn't happened.  Andrew Jackson was President.  My home state of Ohio had only been in the Union for 33 years.  Crazy.

There are many, many charming things about living in an old house.  I love the woodwork.  I love the beams in my basement that are basically logs with the bark partially removed.  I love the solidity.

I have found that textiles look great on the walls of an old house.  And, because I'm the Wool Girl, I have created many of the pieces that hang in my house.  I took up rug hooking a few years ago and particularly like the way rugs look.  I've created a series of square rugs where the pattern is an old quilt block.  I take the pattern to Kinko's, blow it up to about 17-inches square, and then hook the pattern.  I'll post some photos of those another time.

Project of the Day is my stair risers.  I saw a photo in a rug hooking magazine where the artist had made a rug for every stair of the house.  When you looked at the stairs, all you saw was fabulous, fabulous color and pattern.  I was completely smitten and wanted to create a similar look in my house.  But, I'm a knitter first and rug hooker second or third or somewhere down the line.  I thought it would be great to make risers using all the different crafts and techniques that I've learned over the years.

Here's a shot of the whole stair.  I still have 3 more risers to complete but I'm waiting for inspiration.  From top to bottom, the techniques are:

Wool applique using recycled sweaters

Rug hooking

Knitting  (lace)

Rug Hooking

Wool applique, felting, and embroidery

Wool applique (penny rugs)

Proddy with rug hooking

Crochet

My favorite hooked panel is the one I drew myself.  It's my house in the fall.  I love a primitive, folk art style and drew the house in that manner.  Actually, I'm not a great artist when it comes to drawing so the primitive style is just about all I can manage!  The one below it has many styles all together and was the first one I made.  I found a great product -- wool fleece that was carded and pressed into very thin sheets.  You can cut the sheets into shapes.  So, the red rectangle is a piece of felt.  I cut the bird shapes and the flower shape and then wet felted the whole thing.  I was inspired by Frakturs.  Once the felt was done, I embroidered to define and accent the motifs.

I truly love my penny rug panel as well.  Penny rugs are great because you can combine many different textures and colors in a very small space.  Each penny is at least 3 different wools.  This panel is all blues, golds, and browns.  I used leftover wool from one of my quilt rugs.  The buttons came from a very cool blouse I had with small shell buttons sewn all around the bottom.  Naturally, I spilled something on it and had to throw it out.  But, I cut the buttons off first!

The newest panel is my sheep.  I collect sheep (being the Wool Girl and all).  I knew one of the stairs would be devoted to sheep and the long, narrow shape lends itself to a little parade.  I have three boys so the mama sheep has three lambs.  I used a different recycled sweater for each sheep.  The mama is a beautiful Talbots sweater that had wool background and then an overlay of lacy wool.  Perfect.  The lambs are a plain wool, a textured knit, and a cable knit.  The "grass" is a strip from a really great coat I got at a garage sale.  As you know, I love fringe!  The background is a hunk of wool I dyed myself.

The panel below the sheep is my own version of a Log Cabin quilt.  These type of rugs are called Hit or Miss because you use a different strip of wool for every line.  I have a big rug made like this and I love the color mix.

I need to highlight my knit panel because, after all, I'm a knitter first.  I love lace knitting.  It's intimidating at first but is no more difficult than cable patterns.  The needles are just WAY smaller.  A few years ago I bought a cone of very fine Merino wool at a mill going out of business.  I think I'll be using the wool off this cone forever.  This panel is made from that same wool.  The background wool is hand-dyed by me.  Blue looks really great in my house.

I'm not sure what I'll do for the final risers.  Something will inspire me and I'll be off and running.

The Hedgehog Cuff

You know that necessity is the mother of invention. Sometimes for me, necessity breeds creativity! One year ago I had ankle fusion surgery and was faced with 9 weeks of crutches and only having one foot. But, I had prepared. I had projects ready to go in my dining room. My sewing machine was tuned up. My scissors were sharpened. The goal was to create from what I had around. No running to the fabric store or the yarn store or the anything store! Besides, you can't run on crutches and using those horrid motorized carts in the grocery or Target was bad enough when I had no choice.

So, off I went on a journey to use things up. My husband was all for it, trust me, even though the dining room looked like some kind of alien, cashmere bomb went off.

I had an entire BIN of cashmere. I've been making the scarves (see previous post) for several years but couldn't bear to throw out even the smallest scrap of cashmere. Most pieces were long and narrow. Lots of ribbings, too.

During this process, I was learning about a rug hooking technique called "proddy." You use a special tool to draw small strips of wool through the rug backing mesh. I started to play around and came up with The Hedgehog Cuff, also known as The Potscrubber (by my husband).

Here are the steps. First I cut a piece of ribbing about 2 inches by 7 inches. Then, I take some rug hooking mesh (I use linen) and make a little strip about 1 inch by 6 inches. The mesh starts out at 2 1/2 inches by 8 inches. You want a big chunk pressed underneath so non of the mesh frays when you draw through your strips. Sew the mesh onto the ribbing, slightly stretching the ribbing as you go. Leave about 1 inch of ribbing on each end so you can put on the button part.

Then I sew on a bit of recycled wool on each end and add a small button hole on one end. Sew on a small button on the opposite end.

Now the fun begins! Take your cashmere (this bracelet used 2-3 colors of blue plus some yellows and some greens). Cut the cashmere into long strips about 1/3 inch wide. Cut those strips into small strips of about 2 1/2 inches. Exact length is not important. Variation adds to the piece, I think. Put all the strips in a bowl and mix them up so you'll be pulling a random color each time.

The one tool you need for this (besides your sewing machine), is a proddy tool. They run about $25-30 and are available through rug hooking retailers. Insert the proddy into the mesh, grab a strip with the clamp, and pull it back through. Now, do that again, moving all over the mesh, about 100 times! Make sure you insert strips as close as you can to the edge of the mesh so you cover your seam. This is a great project for evenings in front of the TV. I try to get a few bracelet bases done and then cut the cashmere and go to town while listening to the Indians game or whatever.

I have lots of these listed on my Etsy shop: http://www.ragingwool.etsy.com/ . The feel is fantastic. You just want to rub your wrist all day long.