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This is the September Ravelry CAL and Amigurumi Army mission post, which would usually appear two weeks from now (second Thursday of the month after the mission). However, I’m done with them already, and I am going to stop taking part regularly. I have too many of my own projects that are higher priority. So here’s the last of the regular-participation posts.

The CAL theme was “back to school.” I tried to make Stumpy a backpack, but I didn’t measure very well (read: at all) and it was a little snug. However, it fit the Hug Monster:

I did this by chaining, making an oval by stitching around both sides of the chain (with three sc in each end) for two rounds, I think, and then stitching around with no increase until it was as tall as I wanted the front opening to be. Then I switched to stitching in rows, slip stitching at the end to make the first few rows each decrease in length, and then stitching straight (with a ch 1 at the start of each row) until the flap came down far enough. The straps were made just like the coffee mug handle, below, except that I didn’t join new yarn for them – for one of the rows of the bag I did the straps in FL only and then continued with the bag flap in the BL.

I have foreshadowed the next item: coffee! I could have personalized the mug but nothing jumped out at me.

That is, until the coffee did!

The theme for Amigurumi Army this month was “Amis with a Twist.” I got the coffee monster idea from Irka!, though hers is better executed (you may remember her from the fish to sushi pattern). For this one I have an actual pattern.

Coffee:
1. 7 sc in magic ring
2. 2sc around (14)
3. *2sc, sc* around (21)
FO yarn. Join new yarn in BL at a different spot around the circle.
4. sc in BL around (21)
5-10. sc around (21; 6 rows)
11. *dec, sc* around (14)
12. dec around (7)
Stuff, FO, embroider face.

Mug:
1. 7 sc in magic ring
2. 2sc around (14)
3. *2sc, sc* around (21)
4. *2sc, sc, sc* around (28)
FO yarn. Join new yarn in BL at a different spot around the circle.
5. sc in BL around (28)
6-12. sc around (28; 7 rows)
FO.
For handle: join new yarn to row 11. Ch 20, sl st to row 6.
Sl st again in row 6 one stitch away in direction back bumps of chain face.
Hdc in back bumps of chain back up to top of mug; the first one will be awkward.
Sl st one stitch away from initial yarn join; FO.

The final batch of four. Check back in a week for the finished quilt!

Still working on really catching fire on this one, but I’m pleased with the page I have to show you today. I tried out my sewing machine, with a very fine needle and some multicolored rayon thread up top, white polyester on the bottom. Colored pencils did the rest.

This panel of the embroidery sampler got a little bit for its britches. It covers chain stitch, its close relative the feather stitch (which is also related to blanket stitch), and the fly stitch, which cosmetically resembles feather.

The chain stitch is a caught stitch. If you only did half of it the thread would tighten down to a tiny little straight stitch. To make it, with the thread to the front of the fabric, take the needle down right next to where it came up, and before you tighten the thread, bring the needle up again a bit away and catch the previous stitch’s thread. Now pull through and tighten (but not too much!) and you should have a teardrop. To finish the row, just make a little tacking stitch by taking the needle down just outside the final teardrop. That is also what you should do to end a thread. Begin a new thread by taking it up just inside the final teardrop and proceeding from there.

The back of chain stitch looks like the front of backstitch: a bunch of straight stitches end to end.

Just to try it out, instead of putting the needle down right next to where it came up to make the loop, I put it a bit back along the chain. The point end of the teardrop gets a little bit pointier, and the reverse-side stitches overlap a little.

If you decide to make the ends of the teardrop stitch a bit away from each other (perpendicular to the line of stitching), you can get open chain. This one’s a little more complicated because you can’t tighten the stitch until you’ve come up and gone back down again for the next teardrop. I recommend not pulling the needle all the way through the fabric on the down stitch and tightening by tugging the thread by hand, to avoid accidentally overtightening the thread for the next loop. That is not fatal, of course; you can always pull it back to the front of the fabric, but it is annoying.

If you decide to catch each loop of open chain under only one end of the following loop, it becomes feather stitch. Actually, in the second picture above, it starts out as our old friend Cretan stitch and only becomes feather when it starts getting that distinct V shape. Proper feather stitch alternates the side the free end sticks out on; if you keep the same side (say, always catching the previous loop with the left end of the next loop) it is called one-sided feather stitch and looks an awful lot like blanket stitch.

Feather stitch can look very different if you vary the position of the stitches. On the left below is long-armed feather, which has a plant-like look, and on the right is closed feather, which looks more like a trellis.

If you basically start from scratch every stitch with feather you get fly stitch. Properly speaking, fly stitch is an isolated stitch, and if you work it all in a line like the picture below it is closed fly.

To make fly stitch, with thread to the front of the fabric, bring the needle down a bit away and then, before tightening, back up to make a triangle with the three points. Catch the previous loop and tighten. Take the needle down through the fabric either just over the loop or a bit further in the direction the V points, and then back up to the side to start the next fly.

As with feather, you can vary the lengths and starting and ending positions of the stitches to get very different looks. Individual fly stitches are shown below as well.

Back to chain stitch for a couple more. The magic chain stitch is much easier to make than it looks. You need to thread two different color threads on your needle, full complement of strands of each.

The only difference from standard chain is that each time you come up you will catch the threads of only one color. Also, every other time you will have to tighten the thread by hand; the remaining time the color you want to tighten will be shorter than the caught color, and pulling the needle will suffice.

Finally, some isolated versions. On the left below is the isolated chain stitch, or lazy daisy. You get different effects making the tacking stitch long or short.

When diagonal straight stitches are laid on either side of a lazy daisy, the result is tete de boeuf. I have no idea why, since the rightmost stitch above, the wheatear, looks much more like a bull’s head to me. The wheatear is a hybrid stitch; it is a fly stitch finished off by an isolated chain.

Now, I know these stitches maybe don’t seem as decorative or a functional as the others – good for outlines and plants and not much else. However, they can be beautiful when done creatively. I went looking for examples and found a number: samplers on CRAFT show sometimes neat stitching and good color choice is all it takes. Susan at art of textiles has a long-stemmed fly stitch that reminds me of seedlings. And Raphaela at Textile Explorations, whose blog I will surely explore further, has entries dedicated to feather, chain, and detached chain.

That concludes the individual panels of my sampler. The embroidery class is in three weeks; we’ll see the finished sampler then.

This was going to be about altering pants. I have pants, they need altering, I was going to do that this weekend and then post about it. However, altering pants? Not the most exciting thing in the world, and after all the embroidery I’ve been doing I was jonesing for some crochet. I started fooling around with yarn and here’s the result.

I have made finger puppets before, but the first one in this batch was Melissa Mall’s mushroom pattern. The pattern itself, I am not so sure about; it’s maybe a little over-complicated and it fails to tell you which way to put the top and bottom of the mushroom together. Actually the printed pattern itself doesn’t say it’s a finger puppet; I had to remember/reconstruct that based on the fact that the stem is not stuffed and the two pieces would not need to be made separately if it weren’t a finger puppet. Anyway, it came out okay. And sparkly.

For the face and spots I used embroidery instead of felt. In particular for the large spots I stitched straight spokes out from a center point and then wove yarn around that point under the spokes.

Then I just started freehanding. I started with the ideas in Where the Wild Fingers Are (note she uses UK/Australia terminology) and made the following two little guys.

You’ll note on one of them the stitch rows run top to bottom instead of around; I was experimenting with ways to make horns/ears at the top. Unfortunately I managed to sew him up cockeyed; the other was crocheted together.

Then I started thinking about other ways to do things, inspired by the big ridge on the back of the smaller brown puppet. I also thought it would be nice to have a puppet that wasn’t flat across the top. Here’s the result:

To make little guys like this, start with a magic ring. You won’t work in the round, but start with 6 sc in the magic ring, ch 1 and turn, and increase across for a total of 12 sc. Ch 1, turn, and sc across for a few rows (the head of the puppet), and then have a row of sc 5, dec, sc 5. This is mostly to make the puppet more fitted to your finger; you could also sc 4, dec, dec, sc 4 for children; keep in mind the final sc-ing together will decrease the size a bit as well. Continue with the sc across rows until the puppet is the desired length – mine both turned out to be 11 rows total. Do NOT finish off your yarn.

Tighten the magic ring at the top and finish off that yarn. This is a good time to embroider facial features. To complete the puppet, stitch the edges together from the bottom of the puppet to the top (the magic ring) and maybe even past that. You can just sc, or you can do something fancier. The green guy above has alternating sc and dc stopping at the magic ring, which didn’t turn out very exciting. The variegated guy alternated sc and dc but with ch 2 in between each stitch, extending one row past the magic ring. Experiment with other combinations! Turn around at the top and stitch back down again! Go crazy!

I have eight fabrics in addition to the two I did in time for the Feeling Stitchy August stitchalong deadline, so we’ll have four this week and four in two weeks; in three weeks I’ll show you the finished quilt.

Or something of that nature. The August CAL theme on Ravelry was stripes, and the Amigurumi Army mission was monsters. I got really into my stripes project and finished it very early in the month, and didn’t finish the monster until the last weekend.

The stripes project was inspired by my tendency to take partially-cooked oatmeal to work some mornings. What does one do with it? I have some Pyrex bowls with lids, but I don’t want to tip them sideways to put into my regular bag, nor put the warm bowl in my cold lunchbag. Hence, I had an excuse to craft a made-to-order bag. I had been wanting to try out a spiral tutorial I dug out of the Internet Archive ages ago, so in three autumn colors, that became the bottom of the bag. Then I continued the spiral theme around the sides, and put the whole thing together and added handles with an accent color.

The spiral started out kind of awkward, at least the way I interpreted the directions. It smoothed out, though, and I like the way it looks a few rows out from the center. On the sides, I tried to do the same thing in terms of stitch height, with one round per color of sc, one of hdc, and one of dc, then back to hdc and sc. The finished product is slightly larger than necessary but fits the bowl reasonably well.

Now for the monster! He is gangly and gibbon-like.

I put magnets in his hands with the intention that he’d be a kind of emo monster and hug his own knees, but when he was finished he revealed that instead of being emo, he’s a monster with no sense of personal space.

Stumpy is not totally certain about this development.

The monster was freehanded, though I made some notes so the arms and legs would match. His body is basically a bowling pin, and the arms and legs have some bend to them via increases and decreases. I believe for the arms the first row was just sc across the chain, but after that I made 2 sc in each of the 2 centermost sc for two rows, then decreased twice (in the four centermost sc) for two rows, and maybe sc’d across once more before sc’ing the strip into a tube. For the legs I made 2 sc in the ends of each row and 3 sc in the centermost sc, in every row including the first one, for three rows, before doing the reverse for three rows (I used Lily Chin’s slip stitch-like decrease to decrease by three: pull up a loop in each of the next three stitches, and pull the last of those loops through the previous 2 and the one that was on the hook to begin with) and finally, again, sc’ing the strip into a tube. I stuffed him lightly, sewed the outer end of each limb closed (with the magnets in the ends of his arms), and sewed the other open end to his body. Though the yarn was already fluffy, I pulled up the nap to extra-fluffify him with a pet brush.

This week’s installment of the embroidery sampler covers running stitch, backstitch, and variations thereon. These stitches somewhat unnecessarily take up two panels of the embroidery sampler.

Properly speaking, straight stitch is an isolated stitch. Anything that involves only bringing the thread up at one point and taking it back down at a nearby point, far enough to make a dash. When you do this repeatedly at regular intervals, it is called running stitch. Running stitch looks the same on the front and the back, although offset by one stitch length. The back is shown mostly to give you an idea of securing the loose end of the thread.

Backstitch is slightly more complicated, but not too much so. In backstitch the stitches are worked in the opposite direction from the one in which the line grows: stitching right-handed, the line grows to the left, but the stitches are laid down left to right. The opposite is true when stitching left-handed (though again, take this with a grain of salt, since I make my stitches any which way – I think it is easier to put the needle through pointing from your working hand toward your nonworking hand). Come up through the fabric, back up one stitch length, put the needle through to the back and bring it up to the front two stitch lengths away.

The back side of the fabric has stitches twice as long as the front, doubled but offset. Working backstitch “upside-down” and carefully you get stem stitch. Here, the stitches are twice as long on the front as on the back. What makes this different from backstitch worked on the wrong side of the fabric is that the overlap keeps the new stitch on the same side of the old stitch. Some sources will say it is stem stitch if each new stitch is above the previous and outline stitch if it is below but I can’t imagine that mattering to anyone who wasn’t competing in some esoteric embroidery knowledge contest. These stitches are laid down in the same direction as the growth of the line (as the stitches on the wrong side of the fabric in backstitch are).

When the stitches become very slanted and overlap more and more, it becomes encroaching stem stitch and finally satin stitch, as on the right above, used to fill areas in embroidered images.

Split stitch is a relative of stem stitch where the overlap of stitches is very short, and the new stitch does not lie above or below the old, but instead comes up through it. Since I was working with two strands of embroidery floss I just came up between them. You make a stitch, backtrack just a little, come up through the old stitch, and repeat.

Holbein stitch is what you get when you double running stitch, offset so they form a continuous line.

The first picture also has an example of running stitch worked at irregular intervals, and straight stitch used to make a star. The second example uses three different running stitches, a variation on Holbein.

Finally, back to straight stitch proper, as it is the best stitch for drawing. The embroideries for my children’s book quilt use straight stitch as the primary stitch.

Somewhat unnecessarily, the green V stitches and the green 3-line stitches have names: arrowhead stitch and fern stitch, respectively. The others are just freehand, doodling with stitches.

I was going to go to a First Friday about typefaces tonight, but I am instead going to a friend’s house for pasta from scratch. Next week I’ll be at an art gallery for an exhibit opening reception, though. Since Irene drenched us and destroyed a number of buildings and bridges, I have water on the brain. Not in the medical sense. I went looking for water-related arts and crafts.

The craft search was nearly a bust. I found one reasonable page with water-related kids’ crafts, and one kind of cool use for the plastic covers on fluorescent light fixtures to make lake tiles for games played with figurines.

Between art and craft lives paper marbling. The oldest technique is suminagashi, a Japanese method where ink is floated on water and paper set on top to soak it up. It was surprisingly difficult to find good images of paper marbled in that way. One of the links I found was to the Buddha Board. I still don’t know what that actually is because I’m too enamored of the paintbrush effect of the entry page to pass through to the website itself.

If you put “water art” or “flood art” into Google Images you can get some really interesting finds. Here are two posts about water art, and a whole round-up of “water in art” posts from Pond and Fountain World. I found two examples of flood or water-related word art as well.

The results for “flood art” are much more mixed because of Flood as the last name of various artists. My favorite of those that I noticed was Alexandra Flood, some of whose work additionally does have a water-like look.

“Mud art” would have been just as reasonable a search, though, since the aftermath of all the Irene flooding was buckets and buckets of mud and silt. I’ll leave you with just one.

Coming attractions? Well, I thought I would like to figure out how to make a coiling shape in crochet, so I could crochet a hurricane, but I don’t know if that will happen this month. More embroidery on Mondays (and one Thursday) for the time being, but that will let up in mid-October. I do have a magnetic monster for you!

I have a small collection of wooden and plastic puzzles that gets added to periodically. The most recent additions came from my sister, and one of them was just sealed in plastic: ten wooden pieces and a paper that challenged you to make them into a circle. While cleaning house recently I decided they needed a container, and since that was far more interesting than cleaning I set about crocheting one.

I started with embroidery floss and a 2.75mm steel hook. I used up the ends of two skeins of floss and made progress on a third, but I don’t know how I thought this was going to be big enough:

So I switched to worsted weight cotton and an F (3.75mm) hook. This was excessive.

Finally I went to fine yarn (weight class 2) with a D (3.25mm) hook. It was just right!

I’d done a skill self-assessment just the day prior and put “estimation” into the “I’m not so great at this” category. Here’s a good example!

Here is the shelf as a whole. The other new addition is second from the left.

Oh, and as for solving the puzzle, here’s my best attempt so far.