"In the Garden" Again: Rose

Both Kara and I (Teri) have June birthdays, so it is no surprise that we enjoy creating roses. You will see them in many of our designs—in fabric, ribbon, and embroidery. And thus, we knew we would dedicate a block In the Garden to our June flower, the Rose. We layered the petals and accentuated them with stitching and a sprinkle of beaded dewdrops. As you'll see, there are other ways to interpret the pattern. How will your rose bloom?

We love when stitchers make the patterns their own:
one student shared her dimensional rose, created with a
long strip of hand-dyed wool, twisted and tacked in place.
There's always room for adventure—even with roses!

You can find our Rose pattern—and all of the In the Garden patterns—in our website shop. This week, you can use the coupon code ROSE10 to receive a 10% discount on the printed Rose pattern with ribbon.

🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹🌹

Wednesday, February 14, 2018

"In the Garden"—Rose

Happy Valentine's Day! In the spirit of the holiday, we stitched a rose for our garden this month. Whether the red rose signifies love or warm, summer days for you, who doesn't enjoy the beauty of this perennial floral favorite?

While the rose is made with wool, the buds are created using wired ribbon, adding a different texture, and of course, a bit of fun! We also added beads around the bloom for a bit of sparkle—a hint of early morning sun shining on dew drops, perhaps. 

This new block in our In the Garden Block of the Month series is now available on our website, and it comes with the ribbon needed to stitch the buds and calyxes. Here are a few highlights of the rose.

The leaves are placed and appliquéd, and then the rose petals. Each petal is surrounded by a chain stitch. A feather stitch creates the leaf veins, and a blanket stitch with the spokes going outward toward the tip form the serration of the leaves.

The folded rosebud used a 2-inch piece of wired ribbon. From the center point, each half is folded down at a 45-degree angle, so that the edges meet. 

front

back

Using the wired edge on the back, fold down again to shape the ribbon bud so that it will fit neatly behind the sepal pieces. 

For the smaller bud, use a 3/4-inch piece of ribbon. Fold raw edges under as pictured below, and then angled, so that it will be covered by the wool piece.

                   

When the buds are the desired shape and size, place them on the background and tack them so they are secure, but the stitches will not be seen. Appliqué the wool sepal pieces on top of the ribbon buds with matching thread. 

Using hand-dyed 4mm-wide silk ribbon, twist your ribbon and do a
long straight stitch to create the small stems between the rose and the buds. 

Create the small leaves at the base of the buds using a ribbon stitch with that same ribbon.
Using wool thread, do small feather stitches randomly around the buds.

Two bullion stitches top the smaller bud, but you could also use the twisted ribbon, if you choose. Finally, attach size 15 red seed beads randomly within the chain stitches around the rose petals.

We had a great time making our roses bloom in our class at
Primitive Homespuns Wool & Needleworks...

...and we were excited to see what next month will bring to our gardens!

If you would like to join us In the Garden, all the patterns for the first five months are now available on our website: needleseyestories.com. Any ribbon needed to complete the patterns is included with the pattern. Our newest addition is, of course, the Rose.

Rose

Past posts in the BOM series:

• Introducing "In the Garden," A BOM Series: Cornflowers
• "In the Garden"—Oak Leaves and Acorns
• "In the Garden"—Violets
• "In the Garden"—Cardinals and Holly
• 
  

What's Happening Through Our Needles' Eyes

Kara and I (Teri) have been keeping pretty busy, even though all of our teaching venues in the spring were cancelled. Things tend to work themselves out for the good, and the extra stitching time has been a bonus for us. We thought we'd give you an update of what's happening through our needles' eyes.

Woolen Oak Mystery Stitch-A-Long

If you haven't checked this out yet, run—don't walk—and see what the fuss is all about! We are in Week #2, and the response has been overwhelming! The Woolen Oak Facebook group has over 5500 members, and the pictures of the first two blocks being posted by participants are fantastic! For a list of all the designers, check out our post, It's a Mystery! But take a look at the first two blocks below, and click on the captions for more information.

Week #1 by Calico Patch Designs

Week #2 by Blueberry Backroads

While our pattern is not released until week #9, we have been busy, busy, busy—Kara working with a dyer in Germany to get the wool dyed and cut, and me cutting the cotton for the acorn backgrounds to prepare our kits. Due to popular demand, we decided allow the option to reserve kits, so we can mail a couple of days before our patterns are released. Little did we imagine that the response would far exceed our expectations! All the Woolen Oak designers been restocking and cutting, so that we will be prepared for our weeks. Kara and I have already sold as many kits as we thought we would sell, and no one has even seen our block yet! Such support is truly humbling. So we keep cutting. We will be ready for you!

We've only just begun, but as you can see, we are not planning on running out of fabric. And we are developing a very close relationship with our cutting tables and rotary cutters! You can find out about reserving a wool and/or thread kit for our block on our website, by clicking here. Or, you can wait until the big reveal. We plan to have plenty to go around!

Speaking of our website...

I have been working on updating our site and improving on our web shop. What a lot of learning I have accomplished these past couple of weeks, as I prepared the shop to take preorders. My best learning takes place on a short deadline, and so I entered the cyber-world (an alien realm to me) and I am learning to navigate within it. In the process of ironing out the kinks, I realized that our product photos were sorely lacking. So I got busy taking updated photos and trying to improve the site. So while you are looking to order the Woolen Oak kit, take a look at some of our other patterns and kits.

Our In the Garden Series includes a kit for the entire quilt, as well as patterns for twelve individual block designs, which you can mix and match. All of these printed patterns include any ribbon needed to complete the block. The patterns are also available for digital download—without the ribbon, of course.

A few of the blocks featured include:

Cornflowers

Wheelbarrow of Flowers

Garden Gate

We also have full kits available for our Lovely Botanicals Quilt, which include patterns, detailed instructions, and all the ribbon necessary to make the quilt. Detail shots are on the website.

Lovely Botanicals

The Lovely Vase center medallion can also be purchased as a separate block, if you wish to only stitch this design.

  

And the Botanical Beauties blocks can also be purchased as a set of four smaller blocks, if you want only the corner blocks.

We would love for you to stop by and explore our website, which is always in a process of evolving, as I learn more about web design. Truthfully, I'd rather be designing quilts, but I try to imagine that it's just one big virtual quilt!

Conferences

We are busy preparing for Baltimore on the Prairie, which is still accepting (risk-free) registrations. In light of the COVID-19 situation, a final decision about the conference will be made on August first, but as of right now, we are planning on it going forward. Hope springs eternal! 

Baltimore Fraktur

Floral Elegance

Both Kara and I are creating quilts with the Fraktur as a center medallion. We will be ready to share our results with your soon. Patterns for both will be available.

We are thrilled to have been invited to return to The Academy of Appliqué in March of 2021 and to Baltimore of the Prairie for the September 2021 conference! So of course, our needles have been flying on those designs. 

A tiny hint...

Alsatian inspiration for a new design

Under our needles

We are working on a few new designs, which we hope to have ready to release on our website soon. These have a mixture of cotton and wool fabrics, and are embellished with embroidery. 

And finally, we are looking ahead to spring of 2021, hoping to teach a few classes in Germany, one of which will be a beginning appliqué class. Stay tuned for more details as we learn them. But for now, I'm back to the cutting table!

What's under YOUR needles?

Stitching a Sampler and More!

This time of year for Teri and me (Kara) is a little crazy. We are getting prepped and ready for our Academy of Appliqué class, and this year we have two new teaching venues, all around the same time. Needless to say we are stitching, cutting, and typing our little hearts out!

Our first class will be our Academy class, and we are teaching the first two blocks from our Woodland Reverie Quilt. We are excited about these two dimensional blocks, and we hope our students are, too! There are a few seats left in the class, so if you would like to join us, you can contact Barbara Blanton at The Academy of Appliqué.

Autumn

The next class we will be teaching is our very first pattern, Marcia's Flowers. This class will be with the Colonial Piecemakers Quilt Guild, and we will also be doing our lecture The Stories in Our Quilts. We have quite a few new quilts that we have acquired, so it is going to be a lot of fun to share some new stories.

The last class we will be teaching will be in mid-March for the Milltown Quilters guild in Columbia, Maryland. Again, we will be doing our lecture, but we have a brand new class and project to introduce. This group really wanted a class that focused primarily on ribbon and what we as quilters and appliquérs can do with it. We wanted to create a class that gave our students a little more to go home with than a practice sheet and some flowers that might get lost along the way. Thus, our Ribbon Basics class was born, along with a pattern to store our sampler of ribbon stitches and hold our beautiful ribbon flowers.

Our sampler book

Each student will be given our ribbon sampler sheet to practice their stitches on, along with threads and silk ribbon. 

Sampler sheet

A pocket for flower and leaf samples

We will also be making some flowers with wired ribbon, bias silk ribbon, and seam binding ribbon. In the class, we will have baggies to hold the made flowers and extras, but we thought it would be nice to put it all together in a simple booklet that has a place for said flowers, as well as an easy location to refer to the learned embroidery and ribbon stitches. In the class, our students will receive all the instructions for putting their sampler booklet together.

The booklet folds up neatly so everything is contained and easily referenced.

All open

Flip the pocket up.

Fold up again...

...and neatly tie it closed.

This will be a handy reference tool for some of the stitches we will teach in class, but there are so many stitches to learn that we thought it would be good to leave some space to add more pages.

Another page to add

Time to get stitching on the second page!

We would love to teach any of the classes described above at your guild, and we love to travel! Sometimes you might get both of us, or depending on which side of the pond you are on, it might be just one. If you have any questions about any of these classes or any other classes on our website, please contact us at www.needleseyestories.com

Happy Stitching!