Carolyn Pearce Home Sweet Home workbox 3: assembling the pincushion

I had hoped to get the pincushion for the Home Sweet Home workbox etui by Carolyn Pearce completed this week, but I’ve had a bit of a setback! This is how far I’ve got:

Not far, really!

I managed to stitch the embroidered half to the plain backing fabric, right sides facing, leaving a 1 1/2 inch gap for turning. I hand stitched it, and when I turned it right side out, I noticed that my stitching hadn’t been very neat, and that I had more of an octagon than a circle – part of the ‘circle’ is distinctly flat!

I tied strong thread around the pincushion, to divide it into 8 parts, and added the tiny buttons front and back. So far, so good.

I’ve started to stitch the beaded edging, too, but not got very far with it yet. I’ll try taking more detailed photos as I get further on.

The reason it hadn’t really worked out right was that my mind wasn’t on it completely. Ever since I’d done the actual embroidery, I’d been feeling ‘not quite right’ about this pincushion. Has that ever happened to you? While I’d been doing the embroidery, I’d been feeling in a very ‘flat’ mood, because I’d recently ended a relationship with someone who I’d thought of as a friend, but they turned out to be not what I’d thought at all. It seems that the emotions I was feeling at that time have got kind of  ‘stitched in’ to the pincushion, and now, whenever I look at it, I feel fed up again.  So, it’s hard to get motivated to finish this.

Maybe by next week I’ll have got this finished, and then I can move on to something more pleasant   🙂

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How I made my Carolyn Pearce Home Sweet Home workbox 2: the pincushion

As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, I am attempting to make this wonderful Home Sweet Home workbox etui set by Carolyn Pearce of Australia. Her book is wonderful, and very clear, but the project is a big one! However, as several people commented after the previous post when I wrote about it, if I stitch it, they will try to stitch it along with me, so maybe we can all achieve it together!

I’ve decided to make the contents before the box itself, which is not the way that Carolyn explains it in her book. Obviously, it would make more sense to make the box first, as then I’d have somewhere to keep the things I’ve made, but being awkward, I’ve decided to tackle the smallest things first, and work my way up to the biggest, as it’s less daunting that way.

So, I’m going to make the pincushion tuffet.  All the threads I’ve used for this project are from my stash, by the way, and not the ones that Carolyn lists in her book. I suggest trying to do the same yourself, as it would reduce the cost of this project enormously – Carolyn uses lovely threads, but LOTS OF DIFFERENT ONES, and sometimes only for one or two stitches.

So, I stem stitched the twisting stems first with fine Medici wool, and then stitched wound roses with French knot centres in a very pale peachy pink.

Then I stitched more roses using a deeper pink, and worked a few rosebuds in Vandyke stitch.

The sepals of each rosebud were worked by continuing the Vandyke stitch, but in deep green Medici wool.

Finally, I added the leaves in a bright green and more of the dark green Medici wool. The bright green really gave this a lift, as I was beginning to think I had chosen shades which were too dull. The pencil lines outside the tuffet edges, below, show where I will need to tie the tight threads around the assembled and stuffed pincushion, to pull it into shape. If I have stitched the roses in the correct places, then the tight threads won’t cut across any of the roses, but lie in the gaps in between.

Next part is to assemble the tuffet, then……

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A novelty elephant teacosy and traycloth set in needlepoint for a dollhouse

New on my website this week is a matching set of an ‘Elephant’ teacosy kit, with a tray cloth kit echoing the pattern of the rug on the elephant’s back. If you love novelty teacosies, then you’ll love this set! They are both quick to stitch, and easy to assemble.

 

The teacosy measures an inch and a half wide, and is stitched on 32 count silk gauze

Both kits are to be stitched on 32 count silk gauze, in needlepoint embroidery. The teacosy kit contains stranded cotton, a generous piece of silk gauze, clear instructions and stitch diagrams, a suitable needle and a colour block chart to count the design from. The tray cloth kit contains all of the above, plus mahogany components to make the tea tray, which simply need gluing together.

Various designs of teapots and tea sets are also available to complement all the teacosies that I have in my range.

The kits are available from my website – the teacosy kit page is here, and the traycloth kit page is here. They can be bought separately, if you prefer.

If you haven’t stitched in this scale before, or you would like to know what is involved in making one of these kits, visit the FREE ONLINE TUTORIALS page and see how easy they are.

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Carolyn Pearce Home Sweet Home workbox 1: getting started

I love embroidered etui sets. They’re beautiful, and practical, at the same time. When the book ‘Home Sweet Home: An Embroidered Workbox’ by Carolyn Pearce was published a couple of years ago, I had to buy it. But since then, it’s kind of languished on my bookshelf. I have read through it several times, and I even got as far as buying the fabric for it, but what was putting me off actually starting it was the thought of making those little windows on the front. Daft, I know. I just didn’t like the method used – you had to use a kind of Bondaweb to fuse organza or something to the house wall fabric first, and then work a complicated honeycomb stitch to make the window bars. So, I kept putting it off, until….eventually, I picked up the book again and felt the time was right TO TACKLE IT!!!!

[EDIT April 2016: This series of blog posts expanded into a huge series of 46 posts. Please see the final one for a list of hints and tips for making this workbox.]

If I could just get motivated enough to start, look what I could make!

This is the inside of the completd box, as shown in the book – the lift-out tray has compartments for all the tools to fit in. So, I got on with it, and made a copy of the supplies list so that I could write all over it, as I collected together all the bits and pieces that I’d need to complete this project – lots of lovely things, including cloisonne beads, emery powder, brass bee charms, waste canvas, sequins, and tiny beads. Then I looked at the thread list. Now, for anyone who has made any of Carolyn Pearce’s projects before, you’ll know that she just LOVES using lots of different types of threads, all in the same project. This is great if you’ve got a huge bank balance, as many of the specialist threads aren’t cheap, and she uses *lots*. But many of them are only used for one type of flower petal, or the legs on a caterpillar. I’m not joking here – these aren’t major colour choices, these are details. So, I decided that rather than spend a fortune and buy in exactly what it said on the thread list, I’d raid my stash. After all, that’s what a stash is for, isn’t it? I got all the boxes out one rainy Sunday afternoon, and spread everything out on my kitchen table. I store my specialist threads by vague colour groupings, in various boxes and drawers. It looked like this – quite yummy, colour-wise, but a bit messy! Then I went through every colour choice of Carolyn’s, and tried to make a suitable substitution from my stash. It took me four hours, but was great fun, and I ended up with these as my final selection: Then I made tracings from the design sheet of all the design elements for the house workbox itself, and all the individual items to go in the workbox. Using a lightbox, I transferred the marks from the tracings onto my fabric with a sharp pencil. The fabric is a cotton/linen blend from my stash – I needed about half a yard, 54 inches wide (Carolyn allows huge amounts for fixing the fabric in a hoop – I could have managed with much less fabric really). This is the needlebook cover – I have only transferred the absolute minimum of markings – the rest of the elements I’ll place by eye as I go.

 

Now I’m really motivated to get on with it and start stitching something!

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