Two From Trish Burr

Some of you may recall the butterfly embroidery in long and short stitch that I started last summer. The more I looked at it here on my blog, the less happy I became, so I figured it was time to call in the expert! I bought these two books from Trish Burr:

The first one is Needle Painting Embroidery, Fresh Ideas for Beginners (Sally Milner Publishing, 2011). The second is Long and Short Stitch Embroidery, A Collection of Flowers (Sally Milner Publishing, 2006). Although they were not published in this order, this is the order I recommend you buy and read them in.

Once I started to read, I immediately saw where I had been going wrong on the butterfly. Although it is called "long and short stitch," there are in fact no short stitches in the technique. My mistake! In her books Burr does something that is really genius, and which for me was totally the missing link. All her photos and patterns are the same size that they will be in real life:

So you can see exactly how long your stitches should be, how close they should be, and how they will blend together. The 2011 book has several little practice petals and leaves that you can do to perfect your technique. It also has a number of projects, organized in three levels of difficulty. The Little Bee Eater, which Burr recently taught in an online class, is one of the projects in this book.

The 2006 book is more advanced, and goes into more detail on shading and choosing colours.

This book also has scale photos of the projects to go with the patterns. Surprisingly, there is not that much overlap between the two books. All the projects are different, and the 2006 book focuses more on colour, while the 2011 book looks more at technique. Although obviously, those things cannot be entirely separated! I think you would do fine with either one, but personally, I am glad I bought them both. My long and short stitch has already improved!

What's Next?

Obviously, with two projects recently finished, I am now allowed to start two new ones! My next embroidery project will be Breath of Spring, the linen tote bag with an embroidered pocket from Inspirations 56:

This kit has been ready to go with the threads all sorted as long as Cottage Garden was. I was a little put off when I found that the kit came with a pre-printed panel:

I hate it when the lines show around the stitching. But, now that I am starting it, I am also glad that I don't have to transfer that complex pattern! There are 17 different elements to stitch in this pattern, so, many blog posts to come!

My next Bonheur des Dames counted thread project will be the monthly sampler for August, Aout:

If anyone knows how to insert the special character for the "u", please send me an email or let me know in the comments. I can never figure it out!

I have already started both projects. As I was putting the first stitches into the Aout sampler, I realized why I love counted thread work so much. It's because you start with a completely blank canvas, with no prior markings on it. So it's like creating something out of nothing, and it actually feels more creative to me than an embroidery pattern, even though with counted thread projects you are usually more of a slave to the design. There's something magical about watching your first stitches grow.

So, lots to do! Plus, I need a break from Celtic Spring, which is at the stage now where it is nothing but the gold braid for the forseeable future. I can only do so much of that at a time!

Cottage Garden - Stitching Finished

And here's my second big finish!

I put in the last few leaves yesterday. The shadows on the photo are from the sun shining through the tree branches outside, which is not ideal, but this is the best photo I could manage.

I ended up straying from the pattern significantly by the end. I started changing the pattern from necessity, because somehow my stitching had slanted up to the right. So I added the second row of white cyclamen under the rose tree. Then, as I mentioned previously, I separated the rose bush from the purple hollyhocks because I didn't like the way they seemed to grow through each other.

After that I pretty much stopped looking at the pattern! I took out the orange daisies that I had stitched earlier, and put in some local flowers, Black Eyed Susans and marigolds:

The marigolds were made with three strands of floss, two orange and one yellow, and Chinese knots. The stems were fly stitches.

I became somewhat obsessed with creating some variation in the leaves. In the pattern almost everything is detached chain stitches in the dark green you see above. But I know that real gardeners look for different textures in the leaves as well as the flowers, so I tried to do the same. I debated a great deal about the rose bush leaves, which I wanted to be dark and to relate to the heavy bullions. Finally I added a strand of dark red to two strands of the dark green, and stitched detached chains in sprays of five stitches:

The blended thread answered so well that I also used it in the "leaves" of the alyssum along the bottom:

The pattern called for the alyssum to be scattered all along the bottom, but I had to organize it into clumps instead. I learned a lot about myself stitching this!

To further organize the foreground and background, I added some cool blue alyssum in a single strand of floss behind the sunflowers:

And in a similar effort I created some lupins to fill in the space on the far right margin:

So that's it! This will be made into a needlecase. The kit came with a really nice pink gingham for the lining. I am going to redesign it with some pockets inside to hold packages as well as loose needles. Hopefully not too long from now!