Home again, home again, jiggity-jig, as the nursery rhyme goes! I’ve been away from the studio for a little while, and now that I’m back to work, playing among fabric and threads, things are beginning to move again at a snappy pace.

One thing that didn’t happen at a snappy pace – in fact, it barely crawled – was progress on any stitching over the past week and a half. I thought I would have the bicycle that I showed you here finished… but alas!

As I work through my inbox, I’ve noticed a few questions about the last installment of the grapes project tutorial, so I’m going to answer the most prominent one – what is a 1/2″ mylar punch and where do I find one? – below.

So, today, just by way of catching up, here’s the progress on my casual stitching (the bicycle) and an answer to The Punch, so that everyone can be prepared for The Punch.

Oooooh, now it’s time to do something kind of fun with that rolled woven picot that we looked at on Wednesday!

I’m afraid this could just be the beginning. There are so many ideas brewing in my head – alterations, combinations, variations and whatnot on the rolled woven picot!

I love playing with stitches like these, to see where the exploration takes me. Sometimes, admitted, my explorations can end in a flop. But sometimes, they can lead to some surprisingly fun and fabulous results. I hope that you take some time to play with the stitch, too, to see what you can come up with!

Today I’ll show you a larger woven picot roll and what I did with it. The key point here is how to anchor a larger roll to the fabric. It requires a slightly different approach compared to the smaller roll that we looked at on Wednesday.

On Monday, we looked at how to make a really long woven picot without using a pin or needle.

Today, we’re going to look at one thing you can do with a long picot. We’re going to roll it!

For this first foray into rolled woven picots, I’m not using a very long picot. I did use a moderately long pin to create the picot, but overall, the picot isn’t much longer than one that you’d make with an average quilting pin.

Let’s take a look at the rolled woven picot!

I like woven picots! You can do a lot with them!

A woven picot is a dimensional stitch that looks like the petals on this sunflower and this daisy. They can be flower petals. They can be leaves. They can be seaweed. They can be grass. They could be teeth on your favorite monster. They could be shark fins. Duck feet. Bird wings. They can be thick and long and luscious. They can be narrow, fine, and spindly. They can be attached or not attached.

They can be a lot of things.

We have two tutorials (more like stitch explorations) coming up that involve woven picots, but before we delve into those, I thought I’d show you a simple little trick for making woven picots – especially long woven picots – especially Really Long woven picots – when you don’t have a Really Long pin or needle to help you out.

It’s simple, really!

Let me show you what I mean.

Good morning, my friends!

Today, this is me:

Over the years, I’ve written frequently about my second-favorite embroidery tool: scissors!

My first favorite is the most essential embroidery tool – the needle – but they’re such small things and they don’t require huge investments, so we don’t speak about them in the same reverential tones that we often use when speaking of scissors.

Once you really get into needlework, you’ll probably find that one of the first things you’ll want to acquire is a really good pair of embroidery scissors. The qualifications for a good pair of embroidery scissors are pretty simple: they’re small, they’re sharp, they’re well-made, and you fit your fingers.

Here in the States, we enjoyed a three-day holiday for Independence Day this past weekend, and I took advantage of the break to finish my organizational and cleaning projects. Whew! Done for now! It was a crazy, dirty, sweaty, labor-intensive week last week – I’m glad to be back to some sedate embroidery this week!

Last week, we looked at the first installment on the embroidered grapes project. Today, we’ll move forward, looking at three basic fillings for embroidering solidly-filled grapes. We’ll also talk about the order of work and why it’s important.

You’ll need to think of this version of the project more as The Grape Sampler. I’ll be presenting all kinds of ideas for embroidering grapes, all in one design. It will look a little bizarre, because it’s not what we’d expect to see in a coherent piece of embroidery. The idea is that we can then pick techniques that we like best, and work a coherent bunch of grapes using one or two effective techniques.