Yesterday I released a new YouTube Video: My Top Ten Favorite Threads For Hand Stitching.
As a follow up to that video, I’m adding my favorite materials to use, as well. Click on any highlighted text for more information.
Fabrics:
Pat Pauly’s gorgeous hand dyed linens. My absolute favorite thing to stitch on is 100% linen and Pat Pauly’s gorgeous hand dyed linens are the best, most unique and above and beyond anything else that’s out there on the market. Pat is almost always sold out of her linens as the demand has been fierce, however, if you want to learn how to hand paint, stencil and screen print your own, take one of her workshops and you can learn to create your own. As a quick aside, I have a brand new workshop that I’m offering in 2022, which features fabric kits made up of Pat’s linens that she is specifically making exclusively for my workshop. These linens are only available to those who sign up for the workshop! Very exciting.
“Flow” using Pat Pauly’s hand dyed linens.
2. Mulberry Bark. I love layering my linen with Stef Francis’ Mulberry Bark. I stitch directly onto it. Some people have said they soak it in water, but I don’t. I prefer to pull it, bunch it up, stitch it down and let it be.
4. Stef Francis Silk Throwsters. I love this stuff. It’s a bit like wool roving, but it’s silk and has a beautiful hand and texture to it. I needle punch it and then stitch on top of it.
5. Stef Francis Sari Ribbon It comes in a huge hank! I couch it, ruch it, scrunch it, twist it, use it to wrap other things in it and then stitch on it. There is no end to the things one can do with it.
Wrapping with Silk Sari Ribbon
6. Old T-shirt. I love hand dyeing an old t-shirt and then cutting it up. I did a video on how to do this. See below.
7. Silk Velvet It’s fun to hand dye your own, but Stef Francis also carries some beautiful silk velvet in gorgeous colors. If you want to get really creative, you can emboss your silk velvet, as I did in the photograph below. I like using wooden stamps, like these.
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“While you don’t control external events, you retain the ability to decide how you respond to those events. You control what every external event means to you personally.”
The Daily Stoic
When we returned from Africa, I had a livestream scheduled for the next day and a Zoom meeting that couldn’t be rescheduled shortly after that. As my computer had crashed and then been wiped out while in Africa, I really, really needed to get it working again or get a new computer, which is no small undertaking, especially if you’re someone like me who is basically computer illiterate and the very idea of migrating information leaves me in a cold sweat. So I went to the nearest Apple store only to be told that basically I should hold on to the computer I had and try to migrate from my time machine. Only my time machine hadn’t backed up since last April. WHAT???? I know, I know. Evidently time machines need to be periodically checked to be sure they’ve backed up and do not always do so automatically. News to me.
So I went home and backed it up and then had endless problems resulting in tons of phone calls with various tech people, as well as realizing how much information I had lost, and then in the midst of all of this I was overcome with a combination panic attack, grief (my mother had just died) and despair; I went into our bathroom and sobbed. To say I “cried” wouldn’t do it justice. It was more a cross between a howl and uncontrollable sobbing.
“While you don’t control external events, you retain the ability to decide how you respond to those events. You control what every external event means to you personally.”
And that was the thing. I was taking all of this personally. The computer, my mother, jet lag, grief, panic… All of it felt like an assault on me. But it wasn’t personal. It was life. So I’m trying hard to remember that. It’s easy to remember when things are going along as I expect them to or when things happen that are unexpected, but are welcome events. It’s much more challenging to remember when things happen that I don’t like or want.
And yet, here I am writing this post on my new laptop, which has taken some adjustments and came with it’s own set of challenges, typing away!
I’m teaching my last workshop, Improvisational Stitching, of the year and am making new Youtube stitching videos and am getting back to creating and incorporating my travels into my latest piece. I can feel my energy returning little by little.
As long as I don’t take things personally, I’ve got this.
Oh, and look!!! Remember I said I so regretted not purchasing some Kuba bark cloth while in Africa, but that I remembered there was a guy who sells African fabrics on the street? Well over the weekend, I found him and here are the pieces I got from him. This first was badly damaged, but I was able to repair it and even figured out and copied the stitch originally used to stitch the seams together.
Bark Cloth From The Democratic Republic of Congo
And look at this one!! I just love the colors, all natural dyes, made in The DRC.
Kuba Cloth
And finally this one, which is by far the most typical, from what I’ve seen.
Hand Stitched Kuba Cloth made from raffia, hand dyed and sewn from the Democratic Republic of Congo
And here is my improvisational stitching piece where I’ve begun incorporating some of the things I saw and loved while in Africa using Pat Pauly hand dyed linen.
African Inspired
Welcome to my store!
Please browse and look at our patterns available. We also offer Workshops! ~Ariane
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