Brain training

I wasn’t sure I remembered how:

How to blanket stitch, that is. It has been, hmm, several years since I embroidered anything. I was a bit vague about how to form a blanket stitch and, yes, I could have googled it or looked up the instructions in my library of craft books, but where’s the challenge in that? It felt good to give my brain a metaphorical stretch and make it work. I had a couple of false starts: I had to unpick a really ugly tangle of embroidery thread that looked nothing like blanket stitch (more like a spider web on mind altering pharmaceuticals), and frog stitch again when I forgot how to hold the hoop and succeeded in stitching the front of the skirt I’m working on to the back. Oops! Perhaps I should have left the front attached to the back and gone for a very avant garde look…

The skirt is an upcycled cotton one from the op shop, to which I have added handpainted flowers in various shades of pink and purple textile markers. The flower centres are circles cut from my quilting fabric stash, appliqued with the aforementioned buttonhole stitch and basting spray, the centres and stitches also in varying pinks and purples. Love purple! The basting spray had slipped my mind until I was starting this project, entailing a search (and slightly destroy) mission to locate it. Hey, I needed to do some rearranging/tidying in the craft cupboard anyway 🙂