Literally on the last day of February I put the final stitches into the pages of my Northumberland Holiday Journal and reattached the covers with a real feeling of pride. I know my Move It On projects are about revisiting and re-evaluating unfinished project, not about completing them, but it was lovely to hold the finished book in my hand.
Last time I was considering using crosses (as stars) to attach the Kielder Observatory embroidery but after a couple of trials I couldn't make it work successfully on both sides, so I went for the standard running stitches, many of which disappear into the seed stitch background anyway.
This gave me a sound basis for whipping the running stitch twice, once in either direction as I had for the Kielder label on the other side, but in variegated perle, which gives it a bit of a beach rope feel. And leaving enough room round the edge of my writing on the label enabled me to attach it with a row of chain stitch. It took a little while to get there but the later labels are much better than the early ones.
I running stitched the final embroidery down with a delicate superfine silk thread in sand and pale turquoise to match the background.
Luckily before I stitched the final spread in place, it occurred to me that once again, I'd created a piece of artwork and not signed it, so an afterword on the back page might be the place to do that. I used the last piece of the tea dyed aida I'd used for the frontispiece for my name and date and also thought, for the first time, it might be a good idea to add the blog name too.
If you follow me on Instagram (@underatopazsky) then you may have seen my video going through the whole book, but although it's a bit shaky and amateurish, it does give an idea of how the finished article looks.
Onwards and upwards and the March/April Move It On Project has been selected. More next week!
No comments:
Post a Comment