Tag Archive | Crazy Pieced

A Heart a Day: 25

Feb25

Heart Felt Wishes to you all! I love hearts, I love the shape, I love to decorate the house at Valentine’s Day, and I have a lot of hearts… so I decided to post A Heart a Day for the entire month of February.

Love is a smoke made with the fume of sighs,
Being purged, a fire sparkling in lovers’ eyes,
Being vexed, a sea nourished with lovers’ tears.
What is it else? A madness most discreet,
A choking gall and a preserving sweet.
– William Shakespeare “Romeo and Juliet”

Happiest of heartfelt wishes for a wondrous day! ~Christen

National Sewing Month

Sep20

Day 20

Question: When you embroider a piece, do you like to use free-form images or do you use stencils? If you like to have guidelines and shapes, then I have just the thing for you! I have a series of stencils that I designed for C&T Publishing.

fast2mark Embroidery Stencils, the Essential Collection and fast2mark The Darling Motif Collection.

Essential Collection Sampler
Darling Motif Sampler

Happy Stitching, ~Christen

National Sewing Month

Sep27

Day 24

Hand Embroidery Dictionary by Christen Brown, C&T Publishing

Darling Motif Sampler by Christen Brown

This crazy-pieced block gave me the perfect opportunity to embroider the stencils from the Darling Motif Collection, by C&T Publishing. I loved being able to use the variety of stencils here, and the pieced sections were easy to work around. I suggest using basic stitches like the outline, stem, chain, backstitch, straight, lazy daisy, and French knot stitches when highlighting a shape or object.

Happy Stitching, ~Christen

Days of Wine and Roses- silk ribbon embroidered vest

May4

Days of Wine and Roses close-up

Days of Wine and Roses close-up

The inspiration for the colors of this vest came from the main fabric itself, which is from one of my favorite fabric companies, Hoffman Fabrics. The champagne-mushroom dyed background is liberally sprinkled with chocolate and rose colored ferns and leaves. I used these colors and added in a sage, celery and dark green for the ribbon worked flowers and leaves and the embroidery.

The front of the vest has a raw silk panel stitched in at a slightly off kilter diagonal angle. On either edge of the the cotton and silk seam seam run a display of whimsical floral vignettes. The ribbon worked flowers and leaves are made from a variety of new and vintage ribbons including: Hanah silk bias in 2-1/2″, 1″ and 5/8″; vintage cotton grosgrain and velvet ribbons; double sided satin ribbon; cotton and moire fabrics. The vignettes are embellished with silk ribbon embroidery in sizes 2mm, 4mm and 7mm silk ribbon. Silk and cotton threads were used for details and traditional embroidery stitches.

Days of Wine and Roses- vest

Days of Wine and Roses- vest

Happy Stitching! Christen