Crafting On - Embroidery on Knitting

Anyone who knows bereavement will relate to the challenges faced during the past couple of months but through it all designing and creating these little knitted bags keeps me motivated and focused. Apologies to card lovers for the lack of new cards but I just love making these charms. In this current episode of my craft adventure, I’ve created a variety of designs experimenting with colour combinations and styles.

The inspiration I spoke about in Handmade Inspirations and hinted at in Crafting through Loss continues this week when considering options to decorate some of the little knitted charms. I’ve used felt on some which worked well I thought. Wanting confirmation as well as advice I sought the opinion of Julie C of Julies Knit and Sew Corner. If you don’t know her work I would advise you to pay her blog a visit as soon as you’ve finished reading this post.

We became friends when I first started out on this crafting journey and her knitted pincushions was my first ever purchase of handmade items from a crafter met through blogging.

Her feedback was positive with a few pointers to improve on my design idea. She kindly checked over a draft of the pattern I’ve written for the Satchel Bag charm. I will be applying her advice as I plan to offer this and other patterns in the future, so if you're interested, let me know. Julie came up with lots of points I might have missed, very important ones too so it will be a while before they're ready.

Although the felt decorated bags are quite attractive I began to think about other ways to decorate them using the same yarn. Of course that means embroidery. I’ve only ever done cross stitch and blanket stitch so it was to the search engine I went.

Using the keywords 'embroidery on knitting' I found this great website which explained everything I needed to know on all the basic stitches... Knit Simple - Embroidery

and here are a couple more sites I found useful:

The Making Spot

Feather Stitch

You can see the result of what I learned from the Feather Stitch site above.

Of course I didn't just start on my completed charms. I still have some early, less successful charms which were great for practice. The lazy daisy stitch and chain stitches were the easiest to begin with and in no time at all I was ready to try it for real.

My first attempt is the one where you can see the before and after. The result encouraged me to go on and soon I'd embroidered about ten of my charms sometimes including seed beads for extra effect.

I won't embroider them all though...

Now I'm thinking about how to use my new skills to make more unique cards...

I hope you like my work so far. I'll be at Hackney City Farm Art & Crafts Market on Sunday 5th February, launching my new range but I'll tell you more about that soon.

Have a lovely week :)