Gardening Scotland

Posted on 1 June 2012 by Katrina

I said in an earlier post that the next big gardening show was the Hampton Court one but before that there’s the Scottish one at Ingliston near Edinburgh. I’m not even going to that one, despite the fact that for me it’s only about a 40 minute drive away. If I could’ve gone today I would have because it wouldn’t have been so busy, but I just know that I couldn’t stand the weekend crowds and more particularly, being stuck in a traffic jam on the Forth Road Bridge would do my head in so – maybe next year we’ll go on the Friday if Jack has retired by then.

Anyway, I looked at the website and as you can imagine it isn’t up to much compared with the Chelsea one but there are lots of photos of people with plants, not much in the way of actual gardens though. If you’re interested have a wee keek here.

Something else which is going on this weekend which I won’t be going to because it means travelling south is the Spring Fling which goes on mainly in Dumfries and Galloway. Have a look here.

I really quite fancy going there too – some year. Don’t ask me why they call it the Spring Fling when it’s in June! But there’s some interesting art and craft work going on down there and there’s also a nice video of the area, it looks very scenic but whenever we drive through we’re always in a hurry to get somewhere further south.

So what are we doing this long, long Diamond Jubilee weekend? I haven’t a clue, but I do know that we aren’t going to a street party. Are you?

My Vintage Singer Sewing Machine

Posted on 22 May 2012 by Katrina

Did your mum or gran have a Singer sewing machine? Just about every woman had one at one point in our history, my mum had a treadle machine but I have no idea what happened to it when she downsized. The photo above is of the hand cranked machine which I bought newly overhauled from a Singer sewing machine shop when I lived in Braintree in Essex.

To me, she’s a thing of beauty and although I now have a much more modern Toyota electric machine I still pull my beloved old Singer out whenever I’m sewing small things, like the bunting or tote bags. The most recent thing I made on her was a wee padded sleeping bag to protect my Kindle.

I use my modern machine for sewing big things like curtains because it would be a real pain hand cranking such long seams, but I actually prefer my vintage machine as she runs silently and smoothly and has a far nicer stitch, it looks like perfect hand stitched backstitch, and any modern machines I’ve used just don’t have such a neat stitch. If you look closely you can see that I have a wee gadget affixed to the machine base, to the right hand of the needle, it’s an adjustable seam guide, so it’s easy to keep the material straight against it.

These old ones are great to let kids loose on because there’s no fear of them running the needle up their fingers, believe me that has happened often enough with electric machines as they can be quite difficult to control, speed wise, they can be scarily fast.

Where can I find such a thing I hear you say? Aye, there’s the rub – because in the past, house clearers have had no respect for these machines at all and millions of them must have been scrapped or just left to rust away over the years. The upshot of that is that they’re difficult to get a hold of now, so if you your mum/granny still has one I advise you to get your name on it before someone else nabs it or the house clearers junk it.

Although Singer is an American firm they had the biggest sewing machine factory in the world at Clydebank, Scotland, just about 10 miles away from where I grew up. In fact it was so big, the nearest railway station to it was actually called Singer – and it still is. Sadly the factory is long gone, it closed down completely in 1980, they had been on that site for almost 100 years but previous to that they had a factory in Glasgow in the 1860s. You can read more about it here.

If you want to see some seriously gorgeous sewing machines have a look here.

Evee’s Travels

Posted on 2 May 2012 by Katrina

Evee has been on a lace making trip up to the north of Scotland again. So if you love great scenery,flowers and you want to be gobsmacked by the intricacies of pillow/bobbin lace in the making, do yourself a favour and pop over to Evee’s Blog.

Creative Stitches – Lace Making

Posted on 28 March 2012 by Katrina

Evee asked me if I had seen the bobbin lace exhibits when I went to the Creative Stitches event in Glasgow a few weeks ago, and of course I had, so here are just a couple of photos which I took when I was there. I really wanted to show the different designs of the bobbins which are used in the process. You can see them in the photo below. To me they look pretty enough to be earrings.

Here are more bobbins as well as different types of lace on display. Just gorgeous.

The amount of work and concentration involved in making pillow lace is mind-boggling to me, I just know that I could never manage it. I’d end up banging my head off a wall with frustration, but Evee is part of a lace-making group and to me that means that you must be close to the top of the tree as far as lace crafting is concerned, it’s much more difficult than crochet for example, and I’ve never managed anything more difficult than granny squares. Hooks are not my idea of fun.

I think I’m only happy doing things which don’t require too much attention, so I can knit or sew at the same time as watching TV or chatting. Well you’ve got to multi task!

More Creative Stitches

Posted on 17 March 2012 by Katrina

The quilts below are more traditional than the Song of the Clyde quilts I think but there’s still loads of work in them as you can see. I’m just sorry that my photos aren’t great, I had to quickly snap them while there were no people standing in front of the quilts, it was so crowded.

So pretty and girly.

I don’t know about you, but I would love to have this as the view out of my window, rainbow and all.

I should have gone around taking notes. This one has a poem on it but I haven’t a clue what it says. The collage/quilt makes me think of “granny’s hielan’ hame” though. It looks like Loch Lomond with all the wee islands. Deceptively naive looking and it’s another location I would like to live in.

I just have a few more photos of the Creative Stitches exhibition at Glasgow to show – but I’ll leave them for another post!

Creative Stitches – again

Posted on 14 March 2012 by Katrina

As I was saying before, it’s sometimes difficult to see the difference between quilts and embroideries. I think it’s probably just that some wadding/batting is used in the quilt whereas embroideries are just layers of material and stitches. Anyway, these ones are definitely quilts as they were part of an exhibition of the Quilters’ Guild.

The name of the exhibition was The Song of the Clyde, the Clyde is obviously the river which runs through Glasgow and was/is famous for shipbuilding. I suppose these were quilted by the Glasgow branch of the guild.

I think this one of cranes is my favourite.

But this one was fab too.

I was so busy chatting to the lady from the Quilter’s Guild that I didn’t get a chance to read what this one was all about. Gorgeous colours though!

The one below is much more muted but still lovely.

I presume the red shapes are the propellers of ships.

And this one is made from an old linen map which has been sliced up and interspersed with fabric which has been quilted.

There were so many beautiful quilts on show, this is just a few of them. Of course there were lots of DO NOT TOUCH notices about, which was understandable, but honestly I had to go about hanging on to my camera round my neck because they’re all so temptingly tactile looking.

Creative Stitches – at Glasgow

Posted on 13 March 2012 by Katrina

I went to the Creative Stitches Exhibition at the SECC in Glasgow on Sunday, it was the first time I had been so I didn’t really know what to expect. It was hoaching/heaving with women and just a few men (not mine)! All sorts of crafts were featured and there were plenty of knitters and crochet folks about but I was a wee bit disappointed by the knitted things which were on display. As far as I could see there didn’t seem to be much in the way of traditional knitting nor anything really innovative. Thinking back to the 1980s which was when there was a last big resurgence in the craft I remember it as being more exciting somehow – yes knitting can be exciting!

It was quite difficult to get photos but I did just manage to snap some of the Downton Abbey costumes – as you can see.

I took lots of photos of quilts and embroideries as that’s mainly what I’m interested in and I thought I’d start off with this one, a tribute to Jane Austen. It’s about a metre square I think and although this was part of the Quilter’s Guild Exhibition it also has a lot of embroidery on it.

In fact I think it’s often quite difficult to figure out what is meant to be embroidery or quilting. The two crafts seem to cross over into each other’s territory a lot. I would call quite a lot of the exhibits collages, but whatever they’re called I’m just awestruck by the beauty of some of them. I’ll be posting some real crackers soon!

Summer Bunting

Posted on 5 March 2012 by Katrina

I’ve been meaning to get around to making some bunting for ages and I managed to get it done a couple of weeks ago – well one length done – three more to go!

As I want to hang the bunting in the garden, looped from trees to the so called summer-house I thought I had better make it more robust than the stuff you can buy in shops or on-line. With the sort of weather that we can get, even in the summer, those flimsy shop bought things would be rags in no time.

As you can see I’ve strung it along a dresser in my dining-room, just so that you can see it a bit better. I didn’t have to buy any fabric because I have lots in my stash, I’m a bit of a fabric remnant junky and I can’t resist poking around anywhere there’s likely to be nice material, new or vintage. The patterned material is from Laura Ashley, I bought it years ago and as the design is only printed on one side I decided that I would make all the flags/pennants like wee pockets or ‘pokey hat’ shaped as we say in Scotland, so that the design is visible on both sides. It also makes them much stronger.

I used bias binding for the ‘string’ as it comes already folded over and it’s simple to place the flags on the fold and sew along the edge. Job done!

I can see that by the time I’ve finished the other lengths of bunting I’ll have a pile of small off-cuts of the fabrics and I can’t possibly chuck it all out. Maybe I can make a small crazy patchwork quilt with the leftovers. Waste not want not and all that. I think I would have made quite a good pioneer or crofter!

1950s Embroidered Cushion Cover

Posted on 7 February 2012 by Katrina

I wanted to get back to doing some traditional embroidery a wee while ago so I bought this 1950s cushion cover from Ebay, it had obviously been folded up and unused in somebody’s work basket for the last 60 years or so.

It didn’t take me as long to do as I thought it might, I speeded things up quite a bit by adding the buttons to the design where there should really have been satin stitched circles. Actually, you live and learn because I thought that was such a good idea at the time but then I realised that I should have left the button embellishments to last as they did make it difficult to iron when the stitching was all finished. Silly me!

I also stitched tiny beads into the middle of some of the daisy flowers, just to make the textures a bit different. The other daisies have the more traditional French knots as centres. I think the yellow flowers were probably supposed to be pink but I decided I wanted a zingy mainly yellow and green colour scheme, so the pink got the elbow!

The stitches I used are the usual satin stitch, stem stitch sort of things. Now I want to try something a bit more ambitious and modern. With that in mind I bought a lovely book called:
Three Dimensional Embroidery Stitches by Pat Trott from Amazon. It arrived just a couple of days ago so I’m now raring to get on with another project. The book also shows you how to use paint in your designs too, which is something I haven’t tried yet. I can’t wait to experiment.

The image is from Amazon, if you want to look inside you’ll have to take a look at it on Amazon.

I posted about previous stages of this project here.

Winter Woolly

Posted on 9 December 2011 by Katrina

There isn’t much that I can do in the garden at this time of the year so I usually take up my knitting needles in the winter. I used to be really good at it but I’m a bit rusty now and I’m trying to get back to where I was skill wise.

I’ve looked in the shops for nice big thick jumpers but I haven’t had much luck finding what I wanted. They’re often too short because when it’s cold I like my bahookie (bum) to be nicely covered. But this year the sleeves are a bit strange too. Why are they designing nice big pullovers with short sleeves or three-quarter length ones? I don’t know about you but I like to have warm arms. In the past the sleeves always used to be too long for me and they would flap past my hands. I think I have short arms, it was a problem when I tried to learn the violin too, well that’s my excuse! I thought I had found a nice looking woolly in TK Maxx but when I pulled it out to get a good look I discovered that it had only one sleeve! Where’s the point in that?

Anyway, I looked through my small stash of wool and decided to knit an old favourite of mine. As you can see by the dog-earedness of the pattern it has been well used over the years since I first knitted it in the 1970s when leg warmers were first in fashion. I never did knit those but I have done the hat.

I’ve used Wendy Dolce wool which is fluffy but isn’t itchy, I’ve used it before with this pattern and it works fine. So as you can see the back is nearly finished and it hasn’t taken long, the needles are quite thick which always helps. I’ll show you the finished article before Christmas – maybe!

Pining for the West

Meanderings about recipes, books, craft and more

Category Archives: Crafts