Victorian Pincushion on spindle stand: 7 – assembling the ‘strawberry’

The little emery ‘strawberry’ is the final part that I need to stitch as part of the Victorian Pincushion on a spindle stand project that I am making from the Victoria sampler chart  booklet.

This is a pretty little ‘small’ that didn’t take long to stitch. To make it up into the actual strawberry, I first trimmed the fabric to within a centimetre of the running stitch outline round the embroidery. Then I folded the fabric in half and stitched a backstitch line just inside the running stitch (so that I didn’t need to bother removing the running stitches later), to make the fabric into a cone.

Next, I turned it right side out, and ran a line of running stitches around the top edge using number 12 Perle thread.

I lightly stuffed the shape with wadding (not emery powder, as my strawberry is only going to be decorative!). I pulled up the ends of the thread, turning in the seam allowance at the same time, and knotted the thread to make the strawberry shape.

It looked a bit messy at this stage, but the embroidery will cover that up, hopefully!

I then stitched a few long straight stitches in dark green silk around the top of the strawberry, and then added three little silk ribbong bows in dark green. Finally, I added a central loop in variegated silk ribbon and tied a small bow at the top, to hang the strawberry by, on the pincushion spindle.

And this is it finished:

So, my lovely Victorian Pincushion etui set is now complete! I am really pleased with this. It will look lovely in my glass display cabinet with all my other embroidery, but will also be useful when I’m doing even more embroidery.

This is such an unusual project from Thea Dueck of Victoria Sampler. Take a look at her website to see lots of other unusual and creative embroidery projects.

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