100th Post Anniversary & Design Wall Weekend #4

Whoo-Hoo!  Today is my 100th published post!

Little Stitch book by Christina Fairley Erickson
Hand-dyed wool/acrylic felt, hand stitched with hand-dyed and
commercial pearl cotton, embroidery floss and yarn

This week, I've been working mainly on finishing up some little hand-stitch samples which I'm making into books.  It's a bit different from my typical heavily machine stitched and freemotion quilted pieces, but they've been fun and relaxing.  Here is my first book I've completed:

I'm still a little unhappy with my binding, but I think it may just require more practice to get it right.  Since this was my first time to actually complete a hand-made book, I'm pretty happy with it.

Binding of my book

Stitch sampler on cover- Running Stitch, Back Stitch,
French Knots, Seed Stitch, and Fly Stitch

Running or Straight Stitch Sampler

Back Stitch Sampler

Seed Stitch Sampler

French Knot Sampler

Fly Stitch Sampler

Now to some fun with Design Wall Weekend!

Design Wall Weekend #4 -- What do You Have on Your Design Wall?

What kind of blogs should link up?

I think that it's best to have content that matches the content and interests served with the blog that's hosting the party, so please only link up if your blog post is about any of the following:

• Quilting and fabrics 
• Fiber art of any kind
• Hand & machine stitch or embroidery
• Mixed media art
• Book-making, art journals, and sketchbooks
• Tutorials for any quilting, fiber, mixed media, sketchbook and other arts
• These can be works in progress or finishes

Rules for the blog linking party

• Mention Fiber Artist Journey in your post, either with a link or button-use the direct link to the specific post - not just your main blog website (this helps with your search engine position.)   If you have buttons on your sidebar that works great, please just at least mention something in your post, for example "I'm linking to Fiber Artist Journey, see my sidebar for their button."  An example of a link to a specific post would be: http://fiberartistjourney.blogspot.com/2013/04/red-hot-chili-peppers.html rather than http://fiberartistjourney.blogspot.com . If you need help on how to add your link, read this.

• If you follow my blog, I'll follow yours!  PLEASE make sure to comment and tell me you're following, and I'll visit and  follow yours too.)

• Please take the time to visit other links, everyone loves new visitors and comments!  Try to comment on at least two other blogs in the party.

If you would like to add a button to your blog you can copy the code which is below my buttons and add it as a gadget on the layout page of your blog. Here is a tutorial on how to do it.

You Might Also Be Interested In:

Dyeing to Embroider;

Five Days in Stitch Heaven

Hand Stitch Variations

Other Great Blogs to Link Up with and Check Out!

The FreeMotion Quilting Project

Confessions of a Fabric Addict

Nina Marie Sayre's Art Quilt Blog

What a Hoot Quilts

Five Days of Stitch Heaven

Christina standing below hand-dyed
embroidery threads

I'm back from five days in "stitch heaven" with Gail Harker.  The class, "Experimental Hand Stitch" focuses on Procion MX dyeing of embroidery thread and a wool/acrylic felt to stitch on, and then learning some of the basic embroidery stitches and how to use them in a contemporary context.

My friends", Debbie and Rebecca, dyed felts and threads

The felt and threads are vibrant and beautiful.  Gail feels that having your materials inspire you is important, so she helps her students understand their color choices and combinations to be successful with the dyeing process.

Some of my dyed felts and threads

I basically stuck with an analogous color scheme from yellow-green through red-violet.  If you're unfamiliar with analogous color schemes, it means that you pick colors that are adjacent to each other on the color wheel.  So the colors I worked with were greens, blues, and violets.

After our dyeing days, we started doing small stitch samplers.  Each stitch will have its own page in a small stitch book (we even learned how to bind our books!)  We also worked on documenting our samples within a sketchbook, including what threads we used, any observations we have, needles that were chosen, etc.