New designs for 2010

It has been a very busy couple of months! All at once, we had eight new designs to launch and a new catalogue to nurse through the proofs stage, the printing stage and then to send out to customers.

We also had a long wait for the canvases to be printed - a sure sign that the stitching season is well under way - and the poor printers have been going flat out to keep up.

So the new designs for 2010 are ready at last. 

Cat’s Whiskers - teeming with cats of every hue. 

There must be one just like your favourite.

Zoo -  the perfect nursery tapestry in old-fashioned Toy Shop colours. This one can be personalised with an initial and a birth date - alphabet and number charts are included with the kit

Then there are the new MiniKits

Newcomers to needlepoint tapestry naturally prefer to start with something small.

So I have introduced six new small designs that are large in scale. Lovely big easy to see canvas holes and tapestry wool, all go together to make life simple for the beginner.  These little kits are suitable for adults or children who want to learn to stitch. I have even devised some simple 'quick start' instructions to go with them.  Perfect for anyone who wants to get going straight away.

Mini Chicks  Mini Monkey  Mini Owl  Mini Scarecrow  Mini Whale and Mini Ted

I will be introducing more in due course..

Speed stitching?

This month, we are lucky enough to be featured in the 'Editor's Choice' pages of Good Housekeeping. Even though it is the August edition, subscribers were receiving their copies by July 1st and by the time August is upon us, they will have their September magazines!

No matter; the featured kit was Regatta and on the last day of July, Cowes Week begins, from Cowes on the Isle of Wight - the largest sailing regatta of its kind in the world.

One of the first of many orders for Regatta resulting from the Good Housekeeping appearance was posted to the customer on Monday afternoon – she will have received it on Tuesday.  The following Sunday, she emailed me to say her stitched kit was packed and ready to be posted to me the next morning for making up into a cushion! 

I could hardly believe it. Six days to stitch a 10½inch square tapestry.

I think this must be a record.

It arrived this morning.  It had been beautifully stitched in continental tent stitch and the stitcher had worked in horizontal lines.  It was quite distorted so I don’t think a frame was used and I can only assume that she stitched with the much faster ‘sewing’ style as opposed to the stabbing method one has to employ when using a frame.  We can easily stretch the needlework back into shape and it will be made up into a cushion by one of my marvellous ‘cushion ladies’. 

But it will probably take a little longer to make the cushion than it has taken our customer to stitch it!

A Day Trip

Recently I was lucky enough to be invited along on a day trip to Jersey Zoo.  We zoomed across the Channel on a big and rather rattley catamaran and after a short drive we were at the zoo.  The first thing I learnt was that it is not a zoo but The Durrell Wildlife Conservation.  There are no elephants lions or giraffes here, but rather a rare collection of endangered species, living and breeding happily in the grounds of a Jersey estate.

We saw dignified and elegant blue cranes, the hilarious bald ibis, gigantic fruit bats and colourful frogs less than 2 centimetres long.

In almost complete darkness we saw the shadowy shapes of aye-ayes which so enchanted Stephen Fry in his recent TV documentary.

The young macaque monkeys were a delight with their cartwheels and handstands while their parents were busy getting on with the next generation!

We saw the gorillas in their grassy sunken enclosure into which in 1986 a child fell and the elderly Jambo (the first male gorilla born in captivity) lumbered over to the little boy to guard and protect him from the younger, more boisterous gorillas. Pictures and film captured the whole story at the time.

But best of all were the critically endangered orangutans. They don’t swim so they live on two islands surrounded by a moat – maybe 4 metres wide. There are plenty of climbing frames, ropes and swings for them and though the orangutans are rather deliberate in their movements, we were richly entertained by the gibbons that share the islands.

Feeding time was great fun.  The food – chunks of cabbage, whole carrots apples and parsnips - are put in large paper bags like a picnic and hurled across the moat.  The gibbons get there first, then some female orangutans but they don’t touch the bags.  They settle down and politely wait.  Then in his own good time, along comes Dagu the adult male.  He is seriously ugly with huge black pads either side of his face and under his chin.  But to the females he is drop-dead gorgeous and gets first go at the picnic.

We had a wonderful day at the the Durrell, blessed with good weather and thank goodness, flat calm both ways between Weymouth and St Hellier.  But it was a long one – 22 hours from our dawn start to our arrival home in the small hours!  We were tired.
http://www.durrell.org/

A Patchwork Story

Years ago, I decided to make patchwork quilts out of old jeans for my two sons' beds. I thought I had plenty of outgrown jeans but it is surprising how many pairs you need for a quilt.  I was beginning to mooch round charity shops! Anyway, various friends donated to the cause so I made a start.

One day I was stitching away and there was a knock on the door from a  man asking to use the phone because his car had broken down.  (Pre mobile phone days)
We had a cup of tea while he waited for the AA and he asked about the dozens of denim triangles and  remains of jeans all over the place so I showed him my quilt.
Eventually his car was fixed and off he went.  

The next day, I found a bag full of old jeans on my doorstep.

This is one of the quilts I was making.

New from Old

Recently, a friend entrusted me with some tapestry cushions stitched and made by her late mother. 
The tapestries had never been stretched and were all quite badly out of shape.  One even had a whole corner completely missing thanks to my friend's new puppy!  My job was to straighten them out and make them into new cushions.

There were six altogether.  Here are four of them.

 All the tapestries had to be unpicked from their backings ready for stretching.  But first there was the missing corner to put right.

 

I knew how to do it in theory but never actually braved it before - but it just seemed so worth having a go.  In the end, it really wasn’t difficult. 

First I unpicked some of the ragged stitching till I had some clear OLD canvas. Then I could pin a new piece of canvas to the back and line up the holes with the old. I matched the colours as near as I could and then began stitching through both old and new canvas to anchor the patch and then just carried on until the whole corner was complete. 

     

Next, all the canvases had to be stretched.  To do this, I wind wire spirals into the edges and rig them up on this instrument of torture – the Stretching Frame.  Because they had been made up, nearly all the spare canvas round the stitching had been trimmed and mitred!!  Tricky. 

Finally, they get thoroughly wetted and left to dry in the fresh air.

   

Now it ‘s off to the cushion lady with armfuls of fabrics and zips.  Well, I forgot the zips and had to do a return trip….

Two days later….

Lovely square, plump cushions to remind my friend of her mother’s needlepoint skills for years to come.

We're in a magazine!

Classic Stitches asked if they could do a feature about One Off and I readily agreed to an interview with Eileen McCarroll Outram. However, although I am happy to chat about needlepoint all day long, it was a different matter when I was asked to talk about myself! The questions came thick and fast often about things I had never even thought about! "Where do you get your inspiration?" for example. I don't know - ideas just come. Sometimes quickly, sometimes they take months. "Why are so many of your design blue?"... They're not!! ...are they? Anyway, I babbled uncomfortably on for what felt like hours and that was that.

Then a few days later came the phone call. Something had gone wrong with Eileen's recording equipment and she had all her questions safely recorded and none of my answers! For a hideous moment, I thought we were going to have to do the whole thing again. Fortunately, that wasn't the solution. Eileen emailed the questions and I was able to type my answers. Phew! Although it was a long interview, I really didn't expect three pages in the magazine and I'm childishly excited about it - a little bit like seeing yourself on television!

How to read a needlepoint chart.

Recently, a customer ordered a Christmas Decorations needlepoint kit. Then a couple of weeks later she rang up to say she was a complete beginner and was having great difficulty making her stitching match the chart.  Normally, I say follow the printed canvas and use the chart only occasionally as a guide, but her problem went deeper than that.  She didn’t know how to stitch on canvas.  The chart confused her because she thought the grid represented the canvas threads.

It does look that way with vertical and horizontal lines and my instructions took it for granted that even a beginner would realise that one coloured square represents one stitch.

I did a little bit of stitching on a scrap of spare canvas, posted it off and she later rang to say now she could see exactly what to do.  I hope she has gone on to finish her little decorations and we have a new needlepoint devotee!

But all this got me thinking.  The ‘Friendly Instructions’ that go in all my kits and have drawn so many kind compliments did not address this fundamental problem.  I should make it clear that on the chart, one coloured square represents one stitch.  That has now been fixed!  It may take a while for future kits to filter through but this has never happened before so I hope we will be in time for the next one.