embroidery

To help with my appliquéd alphabet chart, I bought The Embroidery Stitch Bible by Betty Barnden, full of gorgeous stitches to try out.  My attempts so far have been fairly limited - I started with a basic blanket stitch and have tried the feather stitch and the Pekenise so far on my appliqué work. 

I really wanted to try out some more of these stitches and so began scouting for inspiration on the internet, what could I make?  This is when I discovered the world of crazy quilts.  I found an amazing blog - Sharon B's Pin Tangle (to be found on my blog roll).  Wow, what can I say?  A crazy quilt is definitely something I'm going to try my hand at.  I now spend my lunch times at work roaming the internet looking for crazy quilts to drool over!

A crazy quilt is perhaps a little beyond my limited experience, so in the mean time I decided to stitch a little set of Winnie the Pooh embroidery kits that I found on offer at The Black Sheep.  I've done Pooh and Eeyore:

I'm waiting for Piglet and Tigger to arrive in the post to get started!  These will be a present for my lovely goddaughter.

I bought a kit a while ago for some flowers, it's by the V&A museum.  I hadn't dared to start it, but I decided I would this week.  I have to confess, it's not going well!  My long and short stitch leaves a lot to be desired and I'm finding it hard to sew neatly on an even weave fabric when the design is not straight!  Below are photos of what I've done so far...

and a close up:

I noticed on the pack that it is crewel embroidery.  I have to confess to not really knowing what that is!  I'm off now to look it up on the internet.