Making a quilted voile Ogden Cami

Making a quilted voile Ogden Cami

A little bit of 18th century Provence

A spinkle of Alabama Chanin style

An echo of Sashiko

A twist of Danish flare……..

That sounds a bit of a concoction doesn’t it?! Hi there, glad you’ve landed here today as I have an interesting dressmaking project to tell you about, which was in short, an experimental idea using a trusted pattern. The inspiration, as you can see, came from all sorts of different sources and spun around in my mind over a few months until it fused together to become this idea. I had no idea if it would work and maybe the jury is still out on that one, but it is so fun to experiment with stitch and texture and well, anyhow, I will let you be the judge of it.

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Making fairisle arm warmers

Making fairisle arm warmers

This project has brought together threads from all sorts of unexpected and sometimes long forgotten thoughts. I am so keen to visit Fair isle now as well, all the Sottish Islands come to that. I rediscovered a beautiful book that I so enjoyed to read. From the very first page ‘Love for Lydia’ enchanted me with it’s gentle descriptive narrative of an english winter. It could have been here …. “Across the valley the floods of January, frozen to wide lakes of ice, were cut into enormous rectangular patterns by black hedgerows that lay like a wreckage of logs washed down on the the broken river. A hard dark wind blew straight across the ice form the north-east…… It was so cold that solid ice seemed to be whipped up from valley on the wind, to explode into whirlwinds of harsh and bitter dust that pranced about in stinging clouds. Ice formed everywhere in dry black pools, polished in sheltered places, ruckled with dark waves at street corners or on sloping gutters where wind had flurried the last falls of rain. Frost has begun in the third week of January, and from that date until the beginning of April it did not leave us for a day. All the time the same dark wind came with it, blowing bitterly and savagely over long flat meadows of frozen floods.”

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Swimming Days embroidery pattern

Swimming Days embroidery pattern

What strange and difficult times we live in with this cover 19 lockdown. I know it is hard for so many people, but am heartened by the wave of creativity that is popping up everywhere. Perhaps some small and good things will come from this pandemic and if people find time to pick up some stitching rediscover the art of ‘making’ even if it is a small project. Creating something hand made is so special and I thank everyone who has bought my patterns and kits over these last weeks and am thrilled to have sent little parcels of Ruby’s designs to as far away as New Zealand and California.

Two of my patterns ‘Skiing Days’ and ‘Skating Days’ have been really popular so I decided it was time to switch to a more warm weather theme and the new design ‘Swimming Days’ is certainly that.

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