Toadstool Embroidery Pouch

Le Challenge - Wood


When the theme of wood was announced we had just been Geocaching and I'd found this cute little wooden toadstool in one of the caches near to Stanton Drew, south of Bristol. In Geocaching, you can take something out if you leave something else behind, so we are leaving a variety of plastic zoo animals. If someone followed us around the same caches then they would have a whole set of animals. Stanton Drew has some standing stones and it's a lovely area to go walking, we saw honeycomb in a hollow tree that had come down with the wind....but Tim was stung by a bee before we had time to investigate it.
Anyway I thought the toadstool would look lovely on a scrappy pouch with some embroidery. I've had the Cotton Floss embroidery book by Nathalie Lymer for quite a while, so I embroidered the toadstools, adjusting the pattern slightly as I don't like satin stitch.

Chase has a lovely free pattern for a scrappy mini iPad pouch on her Quarter Inch blog so I based mine on that, but enlarged it slightly.

I spent some time trying to get the scraps to look right, swapped a few in and a few out and eventually I was happyish. I find it quite hard get the scraps to play nicely together but I love the style. I enjoy doing the hand quilting which I marked out using the rounded edge of a metal knife as I've no Hera marker and Frixion pen leaves white marks on dark fabrics. The knife worked really quite well and I'll use the same next time. I put a dab of glue on the back of the wooden toadstool and then did some colonial knots through the holes to hold it in place. Unfortunately I snipped the corners off the outer pouch to make them neater when turning, forgetting that the hand quilting was fastened off in the corner, so hopefully a dab of glue will keep it from unravelling!
I'm also linking to Scraptastic Tuesday as this is such a great tutorial for using up 2" scraps.

Kantha Embroidery

Last month I went up to the West Country Quilt Show in Bristol. A fantastic show with lots of quilts on display and a variety of workshops to attend. There was also the usual trader stalls with lots of bargains .... But unfortunately not many people were there on the Friday that myself and QuirkyHannah visited.
I went to a Kantha workshop run by Angela Daymond from the Fenland Textile Studio. There was only two of us and Angela provided a wonderful bag of fabrics and a variety of threads.
All the fabric and lace, some of it vintage, had been dyed using natural dyes. These included red onion skins, tulips, turmeric, woad and one I might try ... Boiling fabric in an aluminium pan with a variety of berries. The aluminium from the pan fixes the dye.
Angela explained about the history of Kantha and how it was used to make a new cloth from old saris. Traditionally it is all running stitch with different areas of Southern Asia having a different style.
I found making this very relaxing as there wasn't a specific design to follow and the stitches don't have to be accurate or all the same length.

I knew I wanted to turn this into a book cover, but unfortunately it wasn't quite big enough and so I added the extra red onion skin piece at the bottom left and also the piece above it. I use a random cross stitch with some beautiful threads which I bought from the Cowslip Workshop christmas fair. The threads are hand painted to make them variegated in lovely colours. I used an old shirt for the inside of the cover and decorated it with some rarely used machine embroidery stitch. I added the lace as I can then tuck extra bits and pieces inside the cover.

The theme for Le Challenge this month is Ink and so I'm linking up with Nat and Lucy.

Location:West Country Quilt Show