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Mostly Knitting Blog

Want to find the new stuff on Knitting-and.com, or read about my latest projects and discoveries? This is the place.

Mid Century Embroidered Christmas Decorations

Felt CHristmas decorations decorated with embroidery and sequins

Felt, plus sequins, plus embroidery. Can Christmas decorations get any better?

I found these embroidered Christmas baubles and angel in the Australian Women’s Weekly, December 2nd 1959. “Gay Decorations with the Christmas Spirit” page 1, and pages 2 and 3.

I have a strict decorating rule when it comes to Christmas: the tree isn’t properly done until you can’t see the branches any more. Or it falls over. Whichever comes first. I suspect we own enough tinsel to cover three Christmas trees, to be honest. The shinier, the better! What can I say, I must be part magpie or something 😉

You can follow my Christmas decorating madness and add these to the mix, or keep your tree retro fab and mix these with a few classic vintage look baubles.

Sarah

Beyond TAST – Woven Stitches Sampler

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Embroidered woven stitch sampler for Beyond TAST

(Click the photo for a closer look)

After spending quite a while trying to work out what I wanted to embroider for the three Beyond TAST embroidery challenges that I was behind in, I attacked the stitching like a mad woman and am really happy with the results! I’ll show them in the order that I embroidered them rather than the challenge order.

First up is season 8, my woven stitches sampler. First I stitched a vintage handkerchief that I had dyed navy blue to a background piece of cotton with running stitch and caught down the lace with a French knot in each scallop. I then drew a picture of some houses and a tree inspired by vintage wooden building blocks. The sun is a woven wheel surrounded by open based needlewoven picots, with pekinese stitch surrounding the woven wheel.

The top arch in the house on the left is whipped wheel, again with a pekinese stitch border. On the very bottom arch I wove the spokes two at a time. The clouds are also whipped wheel with a pekinese stitch border around each “puff”.

The main parts of the sampler are all woven with stitches from “Needle Weaving Techniques for Hand Embroidery by Hazel Blomkamp. I worked the house on the left and the tree with perle cottons, while the smaller house is crewel wool.

Things I learnt from this sampler:

  1. I love woven stitches, especially over large spaces. They are fun to work, but I also love the way they look.
  2. I shouldn’t be lazy about going out to the studio to get different colours of thread. The large house was worked with thread I had right on hand and it’s a bit bright 😉
  3. Trust my intuition. On the sun, I almost did one layer of picots and no border around the centre. I trusted my intuition that it wasn’t finished, and was really happy that I added more. After all, it’s embroidery, and if I didn’t like the extra work I could always cut it out.
  4. Blocks of weaving and woven wheels look great with another stitch as a border around them, especially if you’re using them as a filling over a fairly large area.

Next up I’ll tell you about challenge 6, laced and threaded stitches. Because I just hate to do anything in the expected order, apparently.

Sarah

Some Christmas Favourites!

There are only three weeks until Christmas, is it time to panic yet?!? Of course not. We all know you’ve got everything under control, right? If not, here are a few quick Christmas projects to get you back on track.

One Hour Scarf

The One Hour Scarf. Knit on honkingly big needles, you can make the one hour scarf with tassels, a full fringe, or darn the ends for different looks. A super quick and useful present, and a stash buster too! This is always one of the most popular patterns on Knitting-and.com once Christmas approaches.

Intarsia Christmas stocking with trees, Santa Claus and children.

Do you have a new member of the family who needs their own stocking? Check out the Personalized Christmas Stocking from 1945. Updated and charted in colour. Go. Now. You still have time!

Christmas cookies

Do you like to give Christmas cookies biscuits as gifts? Here’s how to wrap up your cookies, ahem biscuits, without risk of turning them into a tin of crumbs.

Handspun ribbed hat, spun and knit by Sarah Bradberry

If it’s Winter in your part of the planet, why not knit a hat, or some mittens or gloves to keep your loves ones warm?

Now get knitting people! There are only three weeks until Christmas. It’s time to panic!!!

Sarah

A Checked Knitting Pattern with a Difference

Knit and purl ridged check swatch

The end is here! Stitch No 33, Striped Check is the final stitch in my knitting stitchathon!

Another knit and purl stitch, I think this one would look particularly nice in a yarn that has a little texture to it like a fine bouclé. In a plain, smooth yarn, an nice project for this stitch would be to make squares in Striped Check and stitch 28b and join them together with bands of garter stitch to make a large afghan with a thick border of garter stitch all the way around. Very cosy 🙂

I hope you’ve enjoyed this series of 19th century and 1930’s knitting stitches. I have a lot of new additions planned for knitters, my fellow embroiderers and more, so if you’d like to keep notified whenever I post something new, subscribe over on the left (on desktop), or underneath this post of you’re using a tablet or on mobile.

Happy stitching!

Sarah

Printing PDF Downloads and an Apology

Sorry.

A kind visitor to Knitting-and.com let me know recently that I had accidentally created many of my pdf files without letting anyone print them without a password.

My sincere apologies to everyone this has affected (I’m mortified that I made such a simple mistake).

I have fixed them now, so if you find yourself with a file from Knitting-and.com that you would like to print, and it’s asking for a password, please download it again and you should be able to print it. (If you can’t, let me know and I’ll double check). Note: This will only affect files downloaded after October 6th, 2018.

Regular visitors may have also noticed that the website has been offline a few times over the past week. This was caused by a failure on the new server, which I have been assured is now fixed. I hope this hasn’t caused too much inconvenience.

Sarah