I am aware sometimes that this blog may be a little too “ooh look what I made!”, well here today is a tale of stuff I haven’t, as I seem to have been hit by the crafting equivalent of Mr. Lacer’s computer demons, where everything he touches crashes and corrupts.
I’m currently working my way through the pile of stuff I need to make for Christmas, I finished the front of an aunt’s cushion last night and not wanting to get my sewing machine out, I decided to make an immediate start on my Grannie’s sampler. Now I have done some cross stitch before but whatever I did last night on it, it just looked wrong, so I gave up on it and now have plans for, yes, another cushion. But I didn’t want to go straight into making another cushion front, so I decided this afternoon after a morning of housework (oh what a fun way to spend Sunday), that I’d make something for me. I’d brought a pair of very cheap jeans a little while ago (£12 from M&S) with the specific idea of making the bluebird jeans from the latest Sublime Stitching book. I cut out the transfer, got my iron out, tried to transfer the pattern, now I knew on denim the pattern wouldn’t show up very well but it didn’t show up at all. So I got my carbon transfer paper out, which never works well with me and didn’t work well this time, but I could see it a little, so I got my white fading pen out, to go over the pattern whilst I could still see, the fading pens fades immediately, it must have been something about the denim. So I get the iron out again, with the bright idea of trying to transfer the pattern to some waste canvas and then using that to transfer the pattern, all I succeeded in doing was one slightly singed transfer pattern and half a melted pin. By this time I was desperate to do something with these jeans because to be honest my wardrobe is getting so bare, six years into no disposable income, that I needed those cheap embellished jeans! So abandoning the idea of embroidery I got my trusty Ed Roth stencil book out and a pot of white fabric paint, if I couldn’t embroider a bird, I was going to stencil one! So I stencil away quite happily, lift the stencil up and my brush had been too thick, this was no (humming)bird, it looked like I’d spilt white paint over my trousers! So the jeans are now in the washing machine in an attempt to get the paint off, so I can do something else with them and whilst I cleaned up the stencil I suceeded in tearing it. So, I’ve given up for the moment in disgust, I could I suppose, sew that cushion front for the aunt onto its cushion back, but with my luck right now, the sewing machine would probably chew the cushion front up between its teeth! But I hate not having something thread related on the go (I say thread related because I am actually doing something else, which will be blogged about in a few days).
