Silk or cotton?

When I designed my first embroidery with the intention of mounting it in jewellery I used cotton thread. It was based on a photo I had taken after an Autumn walk at Caldicot Castle:

I used cotton thread as that was all I knew.

I was pleased with the result and went on to work on smaller and smaller designs using cotton thread. However, a rather amazing embroidery artist, Helen M Stevens, suggested I try silk thread to obtain a more detailed result for such small work. I was unsure at first, I had a lovely big box of cotton threads and it would cost a pretty penny to replace them all in silks. After searching the internet I discovered Pipers silks they sent me some samples of different types of silk thread and I bought a starter pack of floss silk thread.
Floss silk is tricky at first, discovering 'Thread heaven' helped but I still struggle in winter when my hands are dry. Keep the length of your thread reasonable short, I use a size 11 sharp needle as I find the thread holds in the eye better but use whatever you find easiest and be prepared for a piece to take twice as long as with cotton. But when you sit back and look as the finished result you can see the difference:

Oof, shiny!

Gwendoline Annie Copping

I have never been satisfied with my photos. I can photograph flowers reasonably well but my pendants have always been a mystery, that is until I was going through some of my Grandma's unfinished watercolours and had the idea to use them as a backdrop for my work.
Born  1911 Gwendoline Annie Copping my Grandma was always fascinated by art, especially watercolours.

Her work was mostly floral, her favourites were white roses (I made sure I had white roses in my wedding bouquet to remember her), she was fascinated by ikebana, most of her work showed displays of various flowers.

Sometimes she would just focus on one bloom:

I love the pencil sketches in this piece, it would have been beautiful if she had finished it:

Other pieces were obviously just for practise:

She became Gwendoline Annie Collins when she married my Grandfather but sadly he died in 1954 of heart failure when my Dad was just young. She found solace in her art and would apparently disappear out all day painting. She married again later in life and became Gwendoline Pope which is why her remaining pieces are all signed GA Pope.

Whilst most of her work was quite traditional she also appreciated more modern art. We have a couple of her more experimental pieces, I love this one entitled 'Thursday's Child':

I like to think that my Grandma would be proud of my work, she was definitely chuffed when I won a flower painting competition in my early teens and had my painting of bindweed published in a calender.  

Long time no blog.

Hello! So sorry I haven't written for awhile, to be honest I have been struggling to balance social media and actually getting to the nitty gritty of making stock. I am a full time Mother first and foremost,  I sew while my daughter is in morning nursery and I sew when my girls have gone to bed which gives me about 2 hours a day (in terms of my work that is probably a couple of petals!).

But enough of that, as many of you know I have been working on new style pendants, I have really been thinking about the message I want my work to send, I want my pieces to feel a part of nature. This means sourcing, as far as possible, from responsible companies and using natural materials.

Setting my spider in a piece of salvaged willow gave me such satisfaction and got me thinking. When I was cutting my poor, deceased lavender down you could probably hear the cogs turning in my head and I ended up creating this little brooch from a piece of the dried wood.

It obviously went down well as it sold on its first trip out in public. What I loved was the faint smell of lavender that accompanied it.

I then turned my attention to my pendants and sourced the wooden frames from a small Etsy company in Europe. My Dad phoned me one Sunday and said that he loved the new frames but questioned whether the silver chains would jar with the natural image (what a fashion guru!), I had been thinking the same thing so we got our thinking caps on and decided that some sort of cord would fit better. After trawling the Internet I found a great hemp company  Hemp Fabric based in Devon and managed to buy the cord from them. Hemp is such a fascinating and useful plant, I recommend visiting their website and having a browse.
The final pieces looked like this:

The boxes have come from The Tiny Box Company and are made of 80% recycled card.

I am so excited by these new pendants and so full of new ideas.

I promise to try and blog more often, in my next piece I may show you a little more of the watercolours that are in the background of my photos and their origins (I wish I could say they are mine!)