Tag: stitching

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More Little Squares

October was another successful month of churning out my funky little squares.  I need to get all of them out and start looking at them with an eye to finding any possible trends that I developed in them.  My main goal for the project was to make four squares each week this year, and I feel like I have the self-discipline to finish the year on target, and to keep that stitching habit going.  After December 31, I don’t know if I will make many more of the little squares, instead I want to keep that time I have ingrained into my routine to finish older projects.

A couple of secondary goals for the 4 x4” square project was to play with composition and color and to work on making my hand stitching more interesting.  The color and composition play has been mostly successful.  I think that there were only a few squares that just don’t cut it visually, but that is all a part of creating.  I will be able to judge myself better on this when I get all of the square out together at the end.  The stitching goal hasn’t quite gone as planned.  I am just now, in the eleventh month of the project, doing some truly unusual and creative things with my stitching.  Part of my lack of growth in stitching comes from needing to complete each square quickly, and from the size constraint.  These factors slowed stretching myself in this aspect, so moving forward I think I will be able be more innovative in my stitching.

Next week, some musings on projects involving pumpkins and autumn leaves.

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April Squares Bring… More Squares in May?

OK, just ignore my poor attempt at a pun in the title!  Another short and sweet today, here are the 4×4 squares that I have stitched this past month:

Out of each group, which square do you like the best?  Which one do you like the least?

How do you feel about the color combinations?  I definitely notice that certain colors attract me on a certain day, but on another day, I wonder what I was thinking.

Do you like the stitch selections that I chose for the pieces?  What stitches would you have used?

If you love hand stitching like I do, I hope that you will try a few squares.  Even if you haven’t done a lot of hand stitching, give it a try!  These squares do not take long to complete, and who knows, you just might discover a new passion.

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Scraps, Squares, Stitches

I am addicted to these little stitched squares!  This most recent bunch has turned out very well, I like all of them.  I am still amazed at how scraps can be transformed into little treasures.

In this set of four, I played with making stitch flowers by filling in petal shapes with combinations of stitches, and then tried out a monochrome color palette:

More trials with monochrome, and then I jumped back into multicolor mayhem:

These little squares are a great way to audition color combinations. Think of them as preliminary sketches for larger pieces.  I absolutely love the layers of textures that I combined in the square on the lower left here:

I wonder if the square I make for a given day reflects my mood at the time.  I’ll have to pay more attention to that.

 

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A Surprise Sampler

Every time that I learn a new stitch, I try it out first on some bit of scrap fabric.  Over the past year, a 9 x 10” piece of fabric for test stitching has been floating around my hand stitching nook.  It resurfaced a few days ago, and I almost tossed it out.  Here it is:

After having it sitting on top of a pile of projects for a few days, I think I will hang on to it.  I am really enjoying the sampler look of it, while at the same time it shows the randomness that was inherent in its creation.  Adding to the long list of things that I want to make, I’d love to do a small series of pieces with many sections of different hand stitches.  I could have a lot of fun with this.

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More Little Bits of Stitches

Back on November 15, 2019, I posted about some little 4″ X 4″ squares I had completed.  I have a goal this year to make four of these squares a week.  We are halfway through the first month of the new year, here are my squares from the past two weeks:

Some of them are lovely little gems, others are not so hot.  I’m not redoing any of them, or throwing any away.  These are sort of a stitching journal, and a way to experiment with color and composition.  Not everything that we make will be a masterpiece, and that is part of the creative journey.

On a side note, I am only going to be posting once a week this year in an attempt to work on some other things that desperately need my attention (UFO pieces and the rest of this website, for starters).  Next week, I will share whatever progress that I have made over the upcoming three day weekend.