All Our Yesterdays cross stitch collection project: 2

Here’s an update on the little cross stitch pictures featuring cute children from a series called ‘All Our Yesterdays’, designed by Faye Whittaker. I’m planning on doing several of the designs from Faye’s range, so that I can have a collection of them on the wall of my coastal-themed bathroom.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago, my bathroom is having to be re-decorated as we found mould in it, and the person who had come to test the house to see if we had any mould (because I’ve got an allergy) had a fit when he saw that the bathroom was wallpapered instead of being painted or tiled. Hence, this stitching is aimed at giving my bathroom something a bit more interesting than just painted walls, which I find boring!

I started with one of the designs from the ‘Collector’s Edition’ booklet – this one is called ‘Watching the Tide’. It’s a picture of a little girl and boy, standing looking out to sea. It’s very simple, but cleverly designed, as the blues used for the sea and sky are sometimes in full cross stitch and sometimes in half cross stitch, so the colours look more faded, as more background fabric shows though the stitches. It’s subtle, but it works!

I was going to do the figures first and then the background, but I found that doing the detail for a long time made me want to do an ‘easier bit’, so I alternated between detail and background instead.

The cross stitch is transformed when the limited amount of backstitch is added – it really brings it to life.

At about half way through, I photographed it to show you how much difference the backstitch makes. It looks nice just with the cross stitch completed:

But once the back stitch is done, in a dark grey single strand, look how different it is:

I just need to stitch the little boy who stands next to her, and do a bit more background….

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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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