The end of a lovely day and a lovely season

September 12, 2015 stitchesoftime3 Comments

I think my favourite time in re-enactment is the end of the first day of an event, especially when it is sunny and you have had a good day when everything has gone to plan and both re-enactors and the public have enjoyed themselves.

Then you can look forward to a relaxing evening, maybe have a BBQ, sit round the camp fire and visit the beer tent later on. All lovely with the added prospect of another event day tomorrow.

These photos below were taken at the end of Saturday at the Caldicot show last weekend. Caldicot was my first ever large re-enactment event and that is where I fell in love with doing this.

We are so lucky to be able to do this and be in lovely places full of beauty and history.

The castle is a magical place, especially when the evening sun is shining on it and I was just wandering round taking pictures of people relaxing outside their tents, or in the case of the Battle of the Nations group doing a bit of sword training.

The view from the top of the tower was brilliant, thanks to all of the groups who camped inside the castle with their living history displays, it really does bring the castle to life.

I have been helping to organise this event for the last few years and along with Ellie will be organising it again next year, this was our last show for this year and a great way to end the season.

It has been a very variable year in terms of weather, Caldicot being the only show where we have not come home with a wet tent, but still brilliant fun.

Our group, Swords of Mercia, have done more shows for English Heritage than previous years and got good feedback from all of them and hopefully we will get the chance to do those shows again next year.

We have had lots of sitting round campfires, discussing armour and kit, all the new things the boys have bought or want to, and all the things we have made or are going to make.

As usual we have promised to be more organised for next season and make sure that all kit is made well in advance. We shall see if that actually happens!

So I still have a couple of bits of tent to dry, it is raining here at the moment but I am hopefully it will dry up later. Am taking Ted for a walk in a bit and then will be sewing up the wedding jacket 🙂

Hope that you have a lovely weekend planned and thanks for visiting.

Pincushion Heaven

September 10, 2015 stitchesoftime1 Comment

You may know how much I like pincushions, I love making them, (here is a link to a post with some that I have made), I love using them and love looking for inspiration for them on Pinterest.

Well one of my favourite bloggers – Amanda Jean from Crazy Mom Quilts has just released her first line of fabric called Good Neighbours and to celebrate she is having a pincushion party!

What a brilliant idea – I have been visiting the first few on the party circuit and they are all very lovely.

Here is the list from Amanda’s blog if you would like to go and have a look, lots of lovely ideas and they make fab Christmas presents for stitching and knitting friends.

Date	Blogger Name	Blog URL
9/1/2015	Amanda Jean	http://crazymomquilts.blogspot.com/
9/2/2015	Anna	http://www.noodle-head.com/
9/3/2015	Mary	http://maryonlakepulaski.blogspot.com/
9/4/2015	Svetlana	http://sotakhandmade.blogspot.com/
9/5/2015	Debbie	http://www.eschhousequilts.com/
9/6/2015	Holly	http://www.bijoulovelydesigns.com/
9/7/2015	Carla	http://carla-graceandfavour.blogspot.com/
9/8/2015	Faith	www.FreshLemonsQuilts.com
9/9/2015	Vanessa	http://www.vanessachristenson.com/
9/10/2015	Anna	http://www.thimbleanna.com/
9/11/2015	Krista	http://poppyprintcreates.blogspot.com/
9/12/2015	Erin	http://whynotsew.blogspot.com/
9/13/2015	Lee	http://www.maychappell.com/
9/14/2015	Alex	http://teaginnydesigns.blogspot.com/
9/15/2015	Cheryl	http://naptimequilter.blogspot.com/
9/16/2015	Penny	http://sewtakeahike.typepad.com/
9/17/2015	Amy	http://duringquiettime.com/
9/18/2015	Debbie	http://aquilterstable.blogspot.com/
9/19/2015	Anne	http://www.springleafstudios.com/
9/20/2015	Melissa Corry	http://www.happyquiltingmelissa.com/
9/21/2015	Amber	http://www.oneshabbychick.typepad.com/
9/22/2015	Nettie	http://aquiltisnice.blogspot.com/
9/23/2015	Adrianne	http://www.littlebluebell.com/
9/24/2015	Cindy	http://www.liveacolorfullife.net/
9/25/2015	Amy	http://www.diaryofaquilter.com/
9/26/2015	Chase	http://quarterinchmark.blogspot.com/
9/27/2015	Rene	http://www.renecreates.com/
9/28/2015	Erin	http://www.houseonhillroad.com/
9/29/2015	Nicole	http://modernhandcraft.com/
9/30/2015	Teri	http://blog.connectingthreads.com/

Here are a couple on my wish list to make – look at this pretty daisy one with a tutorial here – this is a Russian site but the pictures explain it well.

This one just has to be one of the cutest ones on the planet! The tutorial is here.

Have just finished one of the knitting needle cases for Sarah’s stall, pleased with the design and with the cute stitching I have used from my lovely new machine! Updates of all of that later, I have so much lovely stuff to blog about, been a very good week!

At least I will have lots to share with you when term starts in a couple of weeks and things get very hectic and no crafting gets done 😦

Take care and thanks for visiting.

I am very, ‘Made Up’

September 10, 2015September 10, 2015 stitchesoftime1 Comment

Hello everyone

Today is the final day of Karen’s Made Up fund raising challenge, there is still time to donate if you haven’t done through the Just Giving page. The initiative has raised over £2500 – way more than the initial £1000 hoped for so that is brilliant, well done Karen!

I am also very excited to tell you that I won a giveaway on her blog for a limited edition Made Up tote bag which arrived this weekend 🙂

Thank you Karen, it is lovely and I always need lots of sewing bags to carry things to and from groups.

I have finished the ornament that I said I would make, the design is adapted from Jenny of Elefantz August Stitchery Club design, I just used the central bird motif, added beads and star sequins and the word Noel.

I put it together with two layers of thin wadding, on the rear just quilted across the ornament and on the front hand quilted. I added some little hanging corners using Jenny’s tutorial and a bamboo skewer to keep it in shape.

The white fabric I stitched on also has little leaves on it. The holly fabric is some of the new stash from the Festival of Quilts. I have lots of different holly fabrics and love them!

I do love the little holly buttons, I have been using these for a few years in my ornaments, you can get them from several sources including here on Ebay.

I have got the ornament hanging on my door at the moment and am seriously tempted to leave it there it looks so cute, it’s not too early to decorate for Christmas is it 😉

I am very pleased to have finished the pledge on time as lots of other finishes going on here, (and starts as I cut out the wedding jacket today eek!), am having a busy time finishing the things for Sarah for Yarndale as well.

Am also having serious technical difficulties as my mouse has stopped working, (I struggle with just the pad on the laptop), and I still can’t find my camera, which would not be so much of an issue if all the pictures on my phone did not keep turning themselves upside down!!

Am looking forward to getting everything done and then I am going to do lots and lots of other embroidery designs from my Jenny folder!

Take care and thanks for visiting.

Alternative Dressing Up

September 9, 2015 stitchesoftime1 Comment

Hello again

What we didn’t realise when we got to Lincoln for our event was that the city was also hosting Europe’s biggest Steampunk Festival so we had great fun looking at all the wonderful costumes.

We had planned to visit Lincoln Castle anyway before setting up our event and it was full of people in costume, events such as a fashion show and a market.

There were some fantastic costumes and weapons, managed to get a few pictures on Saturday before we got into kit.

Could only get a back shot of this Cleopatra inspired one – what a gorgeous costume.

I loved this lady’s wings.

Some explorers and butterfly collectors.

Over the weekend we also went out in kit to help promote our event and we had lots of people stopping to take pictures of us.

Had to explain to them that we hadn’t got the time period wrong and I wasn’t supposed to be a Steampunk nun!

Really enjoyed it and as Ellie has always wanted to do Steampunk we girls have decided that we will go to event next year dressed up, just for the Friday and Saturday and then do a quick change into medieval mode for our event on the Sunday and the Monday.

Sounds like a great plan, I do love dressing up and am looking forward to making a costume.

Luckily my lovely son Jake has a top hat he doesn’t use any more ,bought for his prom, and the pattern I am using for the wedding jacket is a Steampunk one anyway so I am half way there!

Have a look at this Steampunk Pinterest page for inspiration. It means that I can also indulge myself in some more charms like these gorgeous keys and clocks. I have these beauties on my Etsy wish list at the moment.

Right back to the day job then, see you all later and thanks for visiting.

Beautiful campsites

September 9, 2015 stitchesoftime1 Comment

Hello everyone and hope that you are well, I have had a lovely weekend away at our last event of the season in South Wales, another beautiful place to camp and I will share some pictures of that event later in the week.

We are so very lucky as re-enactors to camp in amazing places and this was the view I had from my tent the weekend before last at Lincoln Cathedral.

The cathedral looked amazing lit up at night and the sky was beautiful as well, all very atmospheric and makes you realise what a powerful impact these magnificent buildings would have had in medieval times.

Here are some more pictures that I took of the interior of the cathedral.

This is my favourite because of the light coming through the windows – just beautiful!

Bishops’ Palace where we held the event, would have been very impressive as well, now sadly ruined, partly as a result of damage during the Civil War.

There were several Great Halls for entertaining, one of which we used for our camp and the other for our tournament arena. This one below was once used to entertain King Henry 8th and Katherine Howard.

It is brilliant to be able to camp in these places and help bring them to life once more!

I am busy this week with preparation for the new term, not long to go now. This weekend is set aside for making the wedding jacket so wish me luck 😉

Have a good week ahead and thanks for visiting.

Photoshoot

September 1, 2015 stitchesoftime1 Comment

Hello everyone, hope that you all had a really nice Bank Holiday.

We had a lovely time at Lincoln, usual mix of sun and rain and I was drying the medieval tent out on the line until a few hours ago when it started thundering here 😦

This was our last event with the Swords of Mercia group so I need to get the canvas tent really dry before it gets put away.

The Lincoln Bishop’s Palace is unsurprisingly right next door to the magnificent Lincoln Cathedral and we spent quite a lot of time in there and the surrounding area, promoting our event.

Wendy, the partner of one of our knights, Luke, did a photoshoot in the cathedral for myself, Ellie and Luke and I thought that I would devote a post to the brilliant pictures that she took.

I absolutely love these photos, she has an amazing eye for what makes a good shot and the effects she has put on really emphasise the beauty of the cathedral.

It is funny as I don’t normally like pictures of myself but these are fantastic and will be printing several of me off to display at home, as well as lovely Ellie who always looks so beautiful in photos.

Will tell you more about our weekend in the next post as there was another event in Lincoln at the time that we all enjoyed.

Take care and thanks for visiting.

The best kind of day

August 27, 2015 stitchesoftime1 Comment

Hello everyone.

Remember when I posted about the Festival of Quilts and Gillian Travis’s prize-winning Nordic Jumpers Quilt and said I would love to go on one of her courses but they were usually in term time?

Well I found one that wasn’t and had the very best kind of day in a beautiful quilt shop, The Quilt Cabin in Hebden Bridge with Gillian and a small group of other textile enthusiasts.

The course was called, ‘ Take a Simple Shape’, and was based on the idea of, ‘counterchange’, using one or two simple shapes, cutting them out of fabric and swapping the cut pieces to create different combinations of colour.

We started with Gillian showing us some of her work which is amazing, I lost count of the number of times I said, ‘wow’. The shapes she uses are not complex but the use of colour and machine stitching and in some cases printing combines to give stunning effects. Go and look at her blog for more of the stunning inspiration.

This is one of her recent pieces, beautiful trees with outline stitching and printing using a stencil over each tree.

Gillian was a really good tutor, she showed us all her original designs as well as the finished products and took us stage by stage through the design process. The nice thing was that she encouraged us to use images from all sorts of sources so you don’t have to be a great artist to do this

My inspiration was all my lovely flowery Liberty fabric, I wanted to make a wall hanging for the craft room.

I started with drawing different types of flowers until I decided on the shape I liked best. I want to use some of my flower buttons to embellish the finished product so thought this shape would work well.

The next step is to trace the flower onto fusible web and put onto fabric then you cut it out carefully so that you have a shape and the border to use.

The clever bit is putting it onto different background fabrics doing a little mix and match until you are happy and can fuse everything together. Apologies for the upside down picture above – have misplaced my camera 😦 so am back to phone with limited editing!

You then add your backing and wadding and zig zag between the squares before embellishing and binding.

Mine is at this stage at the moment, I have chosen the buttons but need to do some more machine stitching to secure the flowers and some hand stitching as well, have just taken delivery of the most gorgeous Cottage Garden hand dyed variegated thread from this site so will be using some of that.

Here I am stitching at the workshop – action shot by Elaine from the quilt shop.

These were two of the others that were made by people on my course, I love the beetroot one and the bauble one might just have to used as inspiration for one of my own, I do have a bit of Christmas fabric to choose from 😉

Looking forward to using my new machine for finishing this project, it has made such a difference having a good machine to work with, I finished the toile of the wedding jacket in 2 and a half hours with no problems with tension or jamming, it was a really pleasurable experience.

We are off to Lincoln Bishop’s Palace this weekend to do our last show with our group, hopefully there will be lots of sunshine and happy visitors!

Hope that you have a lovely weekend as well, take care and thanks for visiting.

Made Up – blogging for good causes

August 23, 2015 stitchesoftime3 Comments

Hello again, hope you are all well and happy. The sun is shining here after a hot day and an impressive thunderstorm last night so all in good is this little corner of the world.

We got all the planting done and then they were very well watered in by the storm 🙂

I have just dropped in to share with you an initiative by another one of my, ‘imaginary friends’, as my children called them, the lovely Karen of , ‘Did You Make That?’.

I really value blogs as a source of knowledge and ideas and reading them makes me happy as well. Karen has decided to use her very popular blog for a good cause, she is an editor and is raising money for the National Literacy Trust through her Made Up Initiative

As an adult education tutor for 10 years and now as a teacher trainer for 14 years working with trainees who are in the same field I have seen first hand the effects that poor literacy has.

It is not just about reading for pleasure, it is about not understanding rights and responsibilities, not being able to get a good, stable job, the risk of being exploited by employers, landlords , financial institutions etc because you haven’t got the skills to understand information.

Karen is asking people to pledge through her Just Giving Page and to comment saying what they will make by Sept 10th. Everyone who does fulfil that pledge will be entered in a prize draw to win £300 of stitching loveliness – full details on the blog post above.

There is also a Facebook page for updates on the campaign.

I have pledged to finish a Christmas ornament by the 10th Sept, just a small thing but this will be done alongside the making of the jacket. Karen has been so helpful to me with her advice that I was very happy to support the initiative.

I love the fact that blogs and social media can be used in such positive ways, every little helps and as Mother Teresa says ….

I have been working on the wedding jacket, cutting out the toile from an old sheet

Karen is working on a toile for her Made Up pledge as well and suggested that you could mark the toile to make it easier to sew together so I have done that with my new fabric marking Zig Millenium pen, (bought on the advice of Jenny of Elefantz).

Just a sneak peek of the work so far, today’s job is to sew the toile together for the first fitting.

It is all very exciting, I haven’t made anything from a proper pattern for a few years!

Take care and thanks for visiting.

The first of many

August 22, 2015August 22, 2015 stitchesoftime3 Comments

Hello everyone – welcome to another damp weekend in Yorkshire 😉

This weekend I do have some outdoor activities planned, a little planting of the new things I bought while out with Sharon garden centre visiting yesterday and a walk with Ted, so am hoping for some bright spells to do those.

I wanted to share with you the first of my lovely Jenny of Elefantz stitchery patterns. I have just had my first monthly Stitchery Club PDF e-mailed to me and there are some gorgeous Christmas designs which I have started on as ornaments for family.

This earlier design is one of my absolute favourites and will be stitching it again in different colours to frame for my craft room as the sentiment is so good as well as the design being very pretty.

I am not sure where I got the tape measure charm from but the cute clock one is part of a set that Kerry gave me for my birthday.

The fabric came from the Barrington Patchwork shop that we found as part of our National Trust visiting holiday in early June, I knew it would come in handy for stitching related gifts!

I am intending it to be for carrying English Paper Piecing templates and this is going to be added to my Christmas gift pile.

It is a really easy and pleasurable design to stitch and am very pleased with my end result. The binding could be neater and I have attached it to the two sides differently but it is all about learning from experience!

I am also counting this as Project Number 1 on the Sewing Bucket List – a project for your sewing space, ok it’s not for me but I think it still counts!

I am very behind with projects due to the still poorly wrist, it is officially tendonitis and I have to rest as much as possible so will be extending the list into 2016.

This weekend’s crafting activities are to cut out and sew up the ,’toile’ for Amanda’s wedding jacket. On the advice of Karen from, ‘Did You Make That?‘, I am making a mock-up of the jacket from an old sheet to get the sizing right before cutting into the £30 a metre silk brocade!

Will give me a chance to play with my new machine which makes me very happy!

Hope that you have nice things planned as well. Thanks for visiting.

In colour order

August 19, 2015 stitchesoftime2 Comments

Hello, hope that you are all having a nice week, I have been busy stitching away at my hexi pincushions and needlebooks, in between some sorting out of the craft room.

One of the many quilting blogs that I like reading is called, ‘In Color Order’ , run by Jeni Baker who regularly contributes to quilt magazines that I read.

I have long admired those quilters who have their stash organised by colour as mine was piled in a few boxes which meant getting everything out if I wanted to find something for a specific project.

Amanda Jean at Crazy Mom even has her scraps sorted by colour – go and have a look at this storage bucket tutorial for details of how to make the cutest scrap buckets!

Not any more! My lovely friend Sharon has been doing a bit of sorting in her own craft room, when we went round a couple of months ago to help her with a stash sort I admired these drawers and said if she ever wanted to get rid of them I would buy them off her, (she had two sets so still has some herself).

They arrived on Monday and then something else arrived yesterday – more on that later – so I had a good sort out in the craft room yesterday and I am very happy with the result 🙂

I also got the chance to declutter this area, this old shelving unit is very rickety and was just getting used as a dumping ground so things have been made much neater by its removal and it will now have a new home in the shed.

I can see exactly what I have got in the pinks, blues, turquoises etc. I had great fun sorting and found fabric I didn’t remember having!

I also got chance to put up some new pictures and pin boards for my quilt blocks, thanks to our block of the month challenge I now have four of those – more to come as I am still behind, (given that it is the eighth month of the year ha ha), so will take some pictures of those once I have finished a few more.

This very cute little embroidery was in one of our local charity shops so had to come home with me for the vintage embroidery wall.

It was only 75p and the amount of work in it is amazing, look at the detail of the little mother mouse tucking up the children and the picture on the wall.

The other arrival for the craft room was very exciting – took a bit of getting out of the box!

I have a new sewing machine, a very sooper dooper, 80 stitches brand new quilting machine with an extra-large additional plate for doing machine quilting, lots and lots of feet for quilting and automatic needle threading 🙂

I was not really planning to buy myself a new machine at this point though was getting very frustrated with my 5-year-old Janome which just kept losing tension and jamming all the time.

Had put it to one side for a service and got out the older spare machine but when using it this week for a small piece of finishing realised that the reason that I had retired it was because of the faint burning smell when you use it!

Was just doing a little browsing of new machines as you do and came across this little lovely, reduced and with free quilting accessories so treated myself to a very early Christmas present.

Well I do have the special sewing to do and it would be nice to spend more time actually sewing than sorting out a machine!

Looking forward to spending more time this weekend practising with all those lovely embroidery stitches. Hope that you have lots of nice things planned and thanks for visiting.

Stitches of Time

I have created this blog to share my interest in all forms of stitching, quilting, sewing, knitting, medieval re-enactment and costume making – particularly my love of historical embroidery. I also love travelling,especially when it also involves any of my other interests.

The end of a lovely day and a lovely season

Pincushion Heaven

I am very, ‘Made Up’

Alternative Dressing Up

Beautiful campsites

Photoshoot

The best kind of day

Made Up – blogging for good causes

The first of many

In colour order