Monday 11 July 2016

Take to the Sea: a New Project in Progress!

UPDATE: this pattern and a matching felt project are now available in my Patreon pattern library!

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I have so many things in my "work in progress" pile, but what did I do this weekend? Yup, you guessed it: I started something new.

It's a gift for a friend who loves (or, should I say loved) the now-shuttered website The Toast. I wanted to stitch her a little something with one of the Toastie mottoes - Take To The Sea - and after an evening's doodling I eventually settled on a design with lots of waves and a little boat (with a T for The Toast, of course!).


I wasn't 100% sure how I was going to stitch the waves, so yesterday I made a start on embroidering the lettering and thought "well, I'll just see how this goes!"

The words and the boat are stitched with a very dark blue embroidery thread (floss) and backstitch. I'm a bit annoyed by that wonky T in the top line, but I am also trying to be a bit less of a beat-myself-up-about-tiny-mistakes perfectionist with my crafting so let's just ignore that and move on...


I tried out a couple of different options for the waves and decided to go with the most labour-intensive: filling in all the white space with backstitch in shades of blue.

This is gonna take a looooong time and use a lot of thread, but I'm really pleased with how it's looking so far. The text seems to be standing out nicely from the surrounding colour and I love the texture of the waves.


I'm not sure what colour(s) I'm going to use for the boat yet - maybe just white? We shall see. I've got a lot more waves to stitch before I have to make a decision about that anyway.

It's going to take me many, many evenings to finish this piece. Luckily the process is a very relaxing one! I'll be blogging about my progress and posting lots of pics over on my Instagram.

4 comments:

Jennifer said...

Lovely! I'm always amazed at talented people who can think of something they want to make, plan it out, and make it. Your friend is going. to love it

bairozan said...

Wow, this is really time consuming but what a thoughtful gift!

Ariadne said...

This I know I will love!AriadnefromGreece!

Bugs and Fishes said...

Thanks for the comments everyone! It's been really great sharing the excitement of working on this project as I've stitched it - just gotta get it neatly framed in the hoop now so I can blog about it and send it to my friend :)