8 Colour challenge - Part 9: Completed embroidery

The embroidery is complete now! All it now needs is a border of some sort - I tried several embroidered ones, a heavy chain stitch, cross stitch and something else I can't remember the name of and ended up ripping them all out because it looked "wrong". Another thing I tried and ripped out was mist going behind the ghost and in front of the tree - the idea was good but I couldn't work out how to stitch it and the feather stitch using white pearescant thread I thought might work looked awful. In the end I decided that I'd let the dyed embroidery fabric speak for itself and left it as it was.

I'm a bit undecided on the colour of fabric to use - I have several Halloween type fabrics and some autumn ones as well or I may even use a solid colour - it depends what "speaks" to me when I go rootle in my fabric stash.

Colours finished since the last update:
445 - Light lemon
472 - Ultra light avocado green
727 - Very light topaz
734 - Light olive green
745 - Light pale yellow
E168 - Silver

8 Colour challenge - Part 8: The tombstone

I've been a bit slow with stitching the past few days so it took longer than usual to do the tombstone but it's done at last. I had another go at photographing the glow in the dark ghost - it's not been easy and I certainly have a few more experiments to go before I am happy with the result. Your eyes will initially try to tell you that the image below is black but if you look a bit longer you will see a hint of greenish yellow - this is an extreme close-up snipped to show the ghost so it's not the whole image.

Colours finished since the last update:
318 - Light steel grey
413  - Dark pewter grey

8 Colour challenge - Part 7: A ghost!

When thinking of how to use my glow-in-the-dark thread I couldn't help but think of SATW's Beer Ghost - it's just *so* cute! Here you can see him noticing the bottle of beer on the other side of the tree. Even though this looks finished as is it's not - I'll be extending the green to the right now and doing the next bit there.  I still need to work out how to photograph the glow in the dark effect - my attempts of photographing him in the dark failed. Even though I could see him, the camera couldn't.

Colours finished since the last update:
310 - black (will need a bit more of this later though)
E940 - Glow in the dark
Ecru - ecru
700 - Bright christmas green
890 - Ultra dark pistachio green

Working with: 
581 - moss green

8 Colour challenge - Part 6: tree completed.

 At last the tree is complete! It got a bit fiddly with some of the colours and I discovered a few stitches I'd missed before as somehow when there are lots of colours with only a few stitches I seem to overlook one or two. The red doesn't show as much as I'd expected but it's hiding in there in most of the leaves. I also can't count and thought there were 32 colours but actually there are 31.

Colours finished since the last update:
349 - Dark coral
356 -  Medium terra cotta
900 - Dark burnt orange
919 - red copper
920 - Medium copper
3772 - Very dark desert sand
3776 - Light mahogany

Next I get to do the bit with the glow in the dark thread!

8 Colour challenge - Part 5: tree 3/4 done

Yesterday evening I was on a roll and reached the 1/2 way mark of the tree and wasn't ready to stop yet so I just kept on going. I don't make evening photo's because they just make the image flat and washed out due to the flash/lighting. So I ploughed on and am now at the 3/4 mark of making the tree. I have to admit that it doesn't really look like all that much was done but then most of the colours I did were ones with less than 30 stitches each so the difference isn't all that noticeable. The colours in the tree I have left to do mostly have more than 30 stitches each so it will go a little slower.

These are the colours I used since the last update. At the top right is the purple you can just about see at the bottom left of the tree trunk in what will be a pile of leaves - it's used in a few other places but you can see it best there. I hope this is enough to call it using purple in the end result - we will see - even if it's not then I'll still be safe as I do use all the other colours as well and I only have to use 5.

Colours finished since the last update:
921 - copper
922 - Light copper
3777 - Very dark terra cotta
3778 - Light terra cotta
3790 - Ultra dark beige gray
3802 - Very dark antique mauve
3826 - golden brown
3827 - Pale golden brown
3830 - terra cotta
3853 - Dark autumn gold
3857 - Dark rosewood
3858 - Medium rosewood
3859 - Light rosewood
3860 - cocoa
3861 - Light cocoa
3862 - Dark mocha beige

8 Colour challenge - Part 4: tree 1/4 done

Believe it or not but these 8 colours have been used in the tree below mostly making up part of the leaves. The brown you already saw as the tree trunk in my last blog post. The tree now looks like this and although the leaves look more like blossom now they will eventually be more leaf like. As I more or less mentioned before - the tree itself will be using 32 of the 45 colours used in this embroidery which is why I am posting an update now that I've completed 1/4 of the tree colours.

Colours finished:

402 - Very light mahogany 

720 - Dark orange spice 

721 - Medium orange spice 

801 - Dark coffee brown. 

946 - Medium burnt orange 

947 - Burnt orange 

970 - Light pumpkin 

3340 - Medium apricot

8 Colour challenge - Part 3: Finished the first colour

I don't need to tell you what this will be when it's finished but what it does stand for is the first finished colour. The photo also shows the colours of the fabric when combined with embroidery thread - it's looking quite nice. Now that I have the framework down for the leaves I can go ahead and do the "gazillion" (well ok 31) colours that I need for them. I'm starting to get a misty night vibe from this.. lets see where this ends up!

Colour finished:
801 - Dark coffee brown.

8 Colour challenge - Part 2: The colours

These are the colours I'll be using for the 8 colour challenge entry.

As I mentioned yesterday I have to at least use the following colours:

• Black
• Orange
• Purple
• Green
• Silver
• Red
• Ecru
• Glow-in-the-Dark

 And I'm using all of the 8 colours! I'm using several greens and oranges. The red comes in the shape of 349 (3rd from the top left), the purple is trying to hide in this lot and pretend to be brown but it's a really antique mauve ultra dark 3802 and the black is of course 310 and the same goes for the silver (E168), glow in the dark and ecru so I'm meeting the 5 or more rule for this already *grin*. On top of that I'm also using some yellows, greys and browns.

Total number of colours: 45

The more colour orientated people reading this might say "But I can see peach! surely that's pink?" to which I'll cheerfully say - perhaps but it's orange enough for me to call it orange and anyway peaches are orangey yellow so I have no idea why someone decided to call this colour peach.

8 Colour challenge - Part 1: Preparing the fabric

I decided to enter another competition on Deviant Art - the 8 colour competition. The challenge is to use at least 5 of the following colours in an embroidery:

• Black
• Orange
• Purple
• Green
• Silver
• Red
• Ecru
• Glow-in-the-Dark

 I love the idea and had a think about what to do - what I came up with is a night time scene so I wanted a darker fabric to do the embroidery on. I don't have any dark fabric on hand and can't spare the cash for some so soon after my bedroom re-vamp so I decided to do a bit of witch style stuff in the kitchen and cooked up my own fabric dyes made with what I had in the house already.


I made "brown" with reduced coffee and some cornstarch to make it more spreadable and I made "black" with the extra, extra salty liquorice I had lying around the house that nobody liked. Unfortunately I made both a bit too thick so they didn't spread too well and were a bit lumpy on the fabric but since I was going for large sections of colour it was ok

Once I'd "painted" it all on I left it for about 30 minutes and then rinsed it off in a sink full of water and vinegar to set the dye. Then I removed as much water as possible and then ironed it dry.

The white square you see is the starting colour and as you can see the black didn't really take so well and just became a pale grey. The brown is a bit darker but overall for an experiment with something I've never done before this was a decent result.

I will be using this for the 8 colour contest embroidery - I think it will give it just that bit more depth than plain cream fabric would do and will certainly show off the glow in the dark thread I'm planning on using.