Catching up... *again*

I'm so behind with updating some stuff so I'm just going to make another of my catch up blog posts. First of all the Diary cover you see above. This embroidery started with a little red "starfish" shape and then it took a life of it's own as it slowly evolved to become the heavily embroidered piece that it is now. It became a coral reef - full of life and unexpected things - there are starfish, seaweed, a crab and if you look carefully you may even spot the lobster that somehow ended up there. The red wavy bit at the bottom left is only attached at the bottom - the rest is completely free from the background. The long snakelike thing that curves from the bottom to the top of the piece has over 2000 stitches in it and took me several days to do - it's made with the Casalguidi Stitch. I had a lot of fun making this, it was nice trying out loads of new to me stitches and, as it was made free form, even I didn't know what it was going to look like till it was finished.

It's 4 x 3 1/8 inch / 10 x 8 cm, made on 14 ct black Aida using 5 colours of variegated perle (red, green, blue, orange, yellow), 4 colours DMC colour variations, beads and several kinds of ribbon. I used a total of 25 different stitches to create this, many from Sharon b's Dictionary of Stitches for Hand Embroidery and Needlework and some I found in my ancient copy of Enclyclopedia of needlework by TH. de Dillmont.

I made the embroidery into a cover for my far too pink diary, which I'd only got because I LOVE the (not so pink) interior and I knew I'd eventually get round to making a cover for it.

I used the following stitches:
Basque Stitch
Bullion Knot
Bullion stitch
Buttonhole Bar Stitch
Buttonhole Wheel
Casalguidi Stitch
Cast on stitch
Chain stitch
Coral Stitch
Cretan Stitch
Detached Buttonhole Stitch
Detached Chain Stitch
Double Cast On Stitch
Drizzle Stitch
French knot
Feather stitch
Ghiordes Knot
Knotted Cretan Stitch
Renaissance Stitch
Rosette of Thorns
Scroll Stitch
Sorbello Stitch
Whipped Fly Stitch
Whipped Spiders Wheel
Woven Spiders Wheel

One thing that really surprised me is that this was selected as a Daily Deviation over on deviant art!  There are around 35 volunteers there and they each get to choose something from the section they look after as a one day feature and one of the Artisan Crafts volunteers chose this! Thrilled barely covers how I felt about this when I found out hehe.

Although I haven't mentioned the February TUSAL (see sidebar to the left for a link to the project) yet, I did make my monthly jar. You can see threads from the clown I finished in January, the Elemental biscornus and the Soufflé girl Dalek heart.

And this is the not so late Match TUSAL In it are threads from the Coral reef diary cover, the little end bits one keeps from projects from the colours I used for the Dalek heart that I'd not tidied up on time and got a good soaking from a glass of coke that got knocked over. I'd washed ALL the threads on the spools and rewound them on new ones but just couldn't face all the little bits I'd saved so decided to put them in the jar instead. There are also threads from the start of Mike's Mushrooms.

In case anyone has forgotten it's IHSW weekend! So get stitching!!

I was going to add a recipe to this but have decided to write it up as a separate post instead so it's easier to find later on in time.