All Our Yesterdays cross stitch collection project: 1

Have you ever come across these little cross stitch designs? They are from a series called ‘All Our Yesterdays’, and they are designed by Faye Whittaker. She starts by creating lovely little watercolours, and then translates them into cross stitch designs. Most of them are small, and quite simple, although she does have a few in her range that are bigger and more complex.

They’ve been available for quite a few years now, and I have always loved them – there’s something very sweet about all these little children (whose faces you never see, as Faye designs them to be seem from the back only!) in their old fashioned clothes. The colour palette is restricted to blues and reds, mainly, with some beiges and soft purples for details.

I recently came across this booklet of designs, and had to have it, as it seemed such good value for money  – £15 on Ebay for the booklet plus enough thread to stitch the designs, in a huge bundle already sorted onto card thread sorters.

This is the back cover, showing the rest of the 18 designs – I could quite happily make almost all of these.

Then I came across this one as well, which I was really pleased about, as it’s not often found any more. Faye sells a few signed copies on her website, but they are over £90 each!!! I got my copy on Ebay for under £20, so I felt really smug. It doesn’t have threads with it, but there are dozens of charted designs to choose from.

But I didn’t really have a need to stitch many of them. I wondered if maybe I’d make a kind of ‘fabric book’ of some of them (as many are around the same size, so they would work as ‘pages’ quite easily). Then fate kind of ‘stepped in’.

I’ve been feeling quite ill for months, and it had been diagnosed as a black mould allergy, but my husband and I couldn’t work out where any mould might be that could be triggering me, and I just didn’t seem to be able to get better. In the end, we had a specialist come to our house and test it for mould….and a large patch of it was found under the floor in the upstairs bathroom. Now, I really like my bathroom – it’s decorated in William Morris style wallpaper, and looks really cosy:

But the mould specialist nearly had a fit when he saw that the whole bathroom (except for the tiling round the bath) is WALLPAPERED!! ‘Get that off the walls,’ he said, ‘It’ll be causing mould to form behind the paper, and making your allergy worse!’

So, my lovely bathroom has to be re-decorated with painted walls only….

But I’ve decided that if it HAS to be redecorated, then it’s going to be done in a ‘coastal themed’ style….and that means that I have a reason to stitch a few of these lovely ‘All Our Yesterdays’ pictures to put on the walls. I suppose that every cloud has silver lining, then  🙂

I’ll keep you posted as I stitch some……

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John Clayton ‘Circles Series’ cross stitch: 2 – Starting to stitch ‘Sleepy Village’

I am starting to stitch the ‘Sleepy Village’ cross stitch design produced by Heritage Crafts, from original watercolours by John Clayton. There are loads to choose from, and they’re all lovely!!

This is what I’m aiming to stitch – it’s called ‘Sleepy Village’, and is about 10 inches diameter, and full cross stitch coverage:

I started a couple of weeks ago (from the top, rather than the centre, as that makes more sense to me – I don’t want to be putting my hands and arms on the stitching that I’ve already done) – this is how far I got after a week of evenings:

I stitch in horizontal rows, one shade at a time, using a magnetic chart marker to keep my place – which is really necessary with a design like this, as leaves and sky all look pretty much the same, so it’s easy to get confused about where you are on the chart! After two weeks the buildings were starting to give it all a bit of context:

Some of the shades for the tree’s leaves are tweeded (two different shades in the needle at once), which gives it a more complex look than it actually is to stitch. Some of the blue sky is stitched with two strands, and some with one, so it gives it some depth too. Nice touches!

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