Pretty stitches

Pictures of stuff I made, some with descriptions

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I made this piece a while back, never got around to posting it. It is 10 cm in diameter, 4 inch. This was a totally unplanned piece, I started with basting the butterfly (a scrap of printed fabric) on my background fabric and embroidered the pink bush under it, and some grass, and then I wanted a tree. To fill up the space between I decided on a sunset.

The tree is lines of whipped backstitch in a fingering weight wool, this gives a lovely rough and matte effect. I then decided that the butterfly was too flat, and seemed to be behind the pink bush instead of in the foreground, so I fussy cut another of the same butterfly and made a patch with some backing fabric and a lot of overcasting.

I really love the end result, I think the piece has a nice variety in textures and a certain depth. I am still really happy with how the sky turned out, that was a lot of work but totally worth it

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Moss on treebark, a piece of embroidery made by me :)

This piece was a lot of fun to make, and I used a lot of different techniques and materuals. The piece is 10x7.5 cm, or 4x3 inch.

I made padded patches for depth, and I used the following techniques: whipped backstitch, chainstitch, french knots, sandstitch, lazy daisy stitch, Turkey stitch, bullion knot, woven picots, and some crochet elements.

I used regular dmc embroidery thread, fingering weights wools and single ply untwisted yarn

Imgur album with more details and progress pictures:

https://imgur.com/a/rH3TwQs

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A more recent finish, two cute octopodes made from cotton yarn (apart from the eyes and mouth, those are acryllic)

For the small one I followed the pattern as written, but for the large one I didn't quite have enough yarn leftover, so the head is a few rows shorter and therefore more flat than the original pattern.

Free Crochet Pattern for Mini Octopus - thefriendlyredfox.com

This mini crochet octopus is such a sweet little thing! Just a couple of inches tall but with so much personality, and of course those aweso

Amigurumi Octopus Baby Toy Free Pattern Part 2 - thefriendlyredfox.com

 FOR PAGE 1 OF 2 CLICK HERE SC: single crochet HDC: half double crochet DC: double crochet TRC: triple crochet INC: two single crochet in on

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Crazy quilting

I made this tie-on pocket for my friend.

I drafted the pattern myself, based roughly on the shape of tie on pockets that I saw online. It is quite big, about 30 cm high, so plenty of room for phones and wallets.

I enjoy crazy quilting, and both me and my friend have a love for history. Crazy quilting of this style was very popular in the nineteenth century, it was a way to use up all kinds of fabric scraps. I used muslin as the base, and used all kinds of scraps. Off cuts from garment making, pieces of old clothes, small bits of quilting fabric, remnants of ribbon etc. My friend is blind, so along with different colours, I also focused heavily on different textures. There is cotton, wool, felt, metalic and silky ribbon, fleece, flannel and aida. The red beads spell her name in braille.

Crazy quilting by hand is done by appliqueing pieces of fabric onto a base fabric, after which the seams are embroidered over. Some quilters used all kinds of stitches, in this case I chose to use one single stitch. Most pieces have their edges turned under while appliqueing them, but for the fabrics that don't fray like felt and fleece I didn't bother.

I usually start in the middle of my piece with a single scrap of fabric, and work outwards from there, making up the design as I go.

The below pictures are the front and back of a crazy quilted lavender sachet I made for my grandma. Here you can see that I did choose to use different embroidery stitches for each seam.

In this case, I picked my fabric scraps to give a christmassy vibe, and went with gold embroidery to match that.

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I made this nice and bright children's winterset with a ball of yarn my aunt gave me for my birthday. It is meant for a kid of like 10 to 12 years old.

The hat is a basic hat, no pattern.

The scarf is garter on the bias. Very easy pattern:

Odd rows: slip 1, k2tog, knit to end

Even rows: slip 1, kfb, knit to end

This gives nice pointy ends and diagonal stripes.

The dragon is Tarragon the Gentle dragon again, number 11 so far I think? I made the dragon after the hat and the scarf, so was constantly playing yarn chicken with the different colours and limbs. My original plan was to have the whole body and head to be green, but I didn't have enough. But I think I solved it nicely, and this might actually look more interesting.

And the last bit of yarn was perfect for a lenght of I-cord to tie the whole bundle together.

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I have been working on a blouse with lace, vaguely inspired by Edwardian shirtwaists and lingerie dresses. I am a bit further along than the below pictures, but I haven't taken any more recent yet. Once it is done I will post the whole blouse, but some work in progress details first:

This is the front yoke, it almost reaches the shoulders, and the poofy front is gathered into the diagonal edges. The collar is a simple strip of the wider lace and will stand up around my neck. I didn't add a back yoke, the back is just a left and a right back piece. The blouse closes in the back with buttons (and snaps to close the collar).

This is one of my handdone buttonholes, and I am very proud! The buttons are real mother-of-pearl buttons.

And this is one of the sleeves. The lace cuff reaches halfway down my forearm. To attach the fabric to the lace, I gathered up the sleeve, bound the gathered edge with bias tape and then sewed the lace to the bound edge, all by hand with virtually invisible stitches (on the outside at least, on the inside I may have been slightly sloppier in places). The seam is finished in two ways, the lace part is bound with bias tape and the fabric part is flat felled.

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I really enjoy EPP, English Paper Piecing. It is a patchwork method where you use small paper shapes as a base to baste your fabric around, and then you whipstitch the shapes together. Once a piece is sewn on all sides, the paper shape can be removed (and often reused a few times). It is all done by hand, and it is very easy to get nice even shapes (as long as your paper pieces are all nice and even).

Both of these projects are made with hexagons, the pillowcase has hexies where each side is 2 cm, the purse has hexies with 1 cm sides. Both are made from scrap fabric, another reason I love EPP, it is an easy way to use up small fabric scraps. And because you don't need to iron much while sewing, only right after basting and once everything is sewn together, it is also very portable. I just need to trow my hexies, needles, thread and thimble in a little tin and I am ready to go.

Oh, also a picture of the pillowcase in use:

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I often like working on a small scale. This little angel was made with a 1 mm hook and thin cotton crochet thread. The silver parts are silver embroidery thread. I stiffened the angel with diluted wood glue, still my favourite way to permanently stiffen crochet decorations. The amount of stiffness can be controlled with the ratio of glue to water. For stuff that has to be very stiff, like this angel, I use a 1 part water and 1 part glue, for stuff that I want to have a bit more give, 2 parts water and 1 part glue. A kitchen scale is very practical for making the mixture.

To shape the angel, I covered a small coffee cup with plastic foil, set it upside down, and also made a dome out of plastic foil, which I placed on the bottom of the cup. Then I could place the skirt over the dome and stretch its edge around the cup. To give the wings and the body shape, I used a plastic crochet hook which fit precisely trough the body. The wings were sturdy enough already to not need padding out with plastic foil. Once thoroughly dry, about 36 hours later, I removed all the plastic (and gave the cup and hook a thorough wash), and she was done!

When stiffening with glue, it is important to wait until the piece is fully dry. This can take a long time, and it just not being sticky anymore doesn't mean it is dry. When it is properly dry, the piece will be stiff and the smell of the glue will have become way less strong (it disappears basically completely over a few more days).

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This is one of my favourite scrap projects ever. It consists of so many different yarns, all in approximately the same weight (or doubled or tripled to make it the same weight), and knit in stripes.

The inspiration for this project came from the fuzzy black yarn that is between each coloured stripe. That was a ball of yarn I got from my grandma, believing it to be a reasonably sized amount of yarn. Which it was, but it was clear that some little kid (perhaps even myself, I don't remember) had had some fun cutting the yarn in pieces. Someone, presumably my grandma, had just wound all the pieces back into one ball to deal with later. So I wound each piece into its own little ball, and saw that I had about the same amount of those little balls as I had of small scraps, and decided to make something stripy with black stripes in between the coloured stripes.

The bag is knitted in the round, with tunnels for the leather straps at the top, and yarn overs at the bottom for the eyelets. Those eyelets are heavily reinforced with whipstitches. The bag is lined with the cutest fabric ever as you can see.

As of today, the bag is still waiting for a little kid who would like to use it, but I am confident I will find a recipient eventually.

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What do you do when you have an open bag of dried lavender you don't want to go to waste and an empty holiday season due to covid lockdowns? You make a bunch of scented sachets of course. I made all these by hand and used a whole bunch of techniques, regular handsewing, embroidery, cross stitch, some crochet and some beading. I made some of the embroideries specifically for a sachet, such as the light blue in the bottom corner and the pink on black sampler, others were small pieces I had made in the past but had no use for yet, such as the two multicoloured once left of the center and the two motivational quotes above them.

I used mainly fabric scraps and leftover bits of ribbon, plus as you can see different yarns and threads and some buttons. I really enjoyed experimenting with different techniques on this small scale. For example, the blue and silver one actually consists of 3 strips of ribbon I sewed together with tiny whipstitches, edge to edge. And the white one with green and red stripes is white fabric embroidered with running stitches in a colour changing thread, following the grid of the fabric.

Since I made these during the holiday season, I did get to make a bunch of friends and family happy with a random small gift in January, which also was a lot of fun.

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This is a mended patch on the hem of a skirt I made. The skirt is ankle length, and I stepped on the hem, causing a small tear. Luckily, since I made the skirt, I had fabric scraps, and was able to put a patch over the tear. I followed the instructions provided by Agnes Walker in her book Needlework and Cutting Out (available for free on archive.org), which were very clear. The precise matching of the fabric pattern, small stitches and matching thread make this patch virtually invisible unless you look really closely.

The book I mentioned is a treasure trove for everybody who wants to learn how to sew by hand, for garment construction as well as for basic mending and repairing, as it is meant to be a teaching manual and therefore follows a very logical order and clear instructions. It also has patterns and instructions for some basic garments, mainly underwear.

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A very curious little one, this pastel rainbow dragon! Her name is Elizabeth and she happily lives with my sister

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I realized I forgot to link to the free pattern for these cuties! Hereby:

Tarragon the Gentle Dragon pattern by Knit-a- Zoo

Mythology or reality? The reality is that Tarragon is a dragon with a tender heart and an obscure predilection for French cuisine. He will

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Apart from the dragons and basic socks, I think this is the pattern I made the most often in different colourways, 4 or 5 times. I don't have pictures of them all anymore sadly, but coincidentally these two are the first (blue) and most recent (pink).

The pattern is lovely, I do have one tip though: I use a triple crochet (us) or quadruple crochet (uk) as the last stitch of every row, instead of the double crochet (us) or triple crochet (uk) the pattern gives, to make sure the long edge of the triangle isn't too tight.

(Disclaimer: I only use the charts, so I cannot speak about the accuracy of the written pattern)

Link to the pattern:

Edlothia pattern by Jasmin Räsänen

English pattern with chart added

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Another piece I made for my grandma. This time a crochet doily with a very fun rainbow yarn. Usually, I make doilies with solid yarn, but when I showed my grandma this impulsivly bought rainbow cotton she said she tought it would make a lovely doily. So I made this one for her. Because the yarn itself is so busy I choose a relatively simple pattern with not too much detail.

In this picture, you can see where she put it, on her living room table. She liked to make her space pretty with knicknacks and decorations, often on trays like this, for ease of putting away when the table neede use.

The glass jar always had walnuts in it, as long as I can remember, sometimes mixed with those big white raisins. She had a walnut tree in her yard, and when the jar would become empty, she would aks my cousins or uncles to crack some new walnuts to fill it again when they visited.

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This small embroidery hoop is very special to me. I embroidered a picture my brother took of the beach in our hometown and we gave it to our grandma for her birthday.

I colored the sky with colored pencil (which has now, a few years later, faded quite a bit sadly). I originally planned to fill the entire beach with the small scattered stitches, but while embroidering decided that only filling the bottom part would give more depth to the piece.

Sadly not visible in this picture, but my brother decorated the sides of the hoop with woodburning motives, and I covered the back with felt and a tag with our names and the date.

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Sometimes, a basket with washcloths, make up pads and some soap or a bath bomb are the perfect gift for those in your life who use make up, and you make a set in their favourite colour especially for them.

Sometimes, you have a bunch of cotton yarn you want to get rid off and a desire to buy all the nice smelling soaps at the store and you need to find an excuse. I will absolutely not comment on which scenario is true in these cases.

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Here Elizabeth is again, with her two friends Archibald (left) and Theodore (middle)