Tea cup pin cushions.

Hi,
Just a short post today to show what I have been making recently. These tea cup and saucer pin cushions were great fun to make. I had a lovely time with my stash of beads, ribbon roses, trimmings and fabric matching them with the cups and saucers. I think my favourite is the larger fruit cup and tray like saucer. I loved combining the dark blue fabric with purple flowers to the pattern on the china.

Parrot tulips in watercolour.

Hi, It has been a very busy time. I am teaching four days a week at the moment so finding time for my own painting and embroidery has been difficult but I have finished a painting of Parrot tulips. I love these flowers, they are so bold and bright and a pleasure to paint. I used Sennelier paints and Fabriano Artistico paper. I have read a lot of blogs recently saying how the quality of this paper is not as good as it once was. Luckily the paper is an older sheet I purchased some time ago. I have just purchased some more so I hope the paper will react the way I am accustomed too. I painted the flower heads first and to keep the buds and flowers from changing too quickly I tied thin quilting thread around them. The flowers open very quickly when you bring them indoors so I also took some photographs. I then painted the stems and finished with the leaves.

Embroidery Winter.

Hi, I have now completed the ivy on the embroidery. The next stage is to add the church in the snow to the space remaining. The idea is that I will offer this design in my Etsy shop to be made to order giving customers the option of adding a building of their choice to the space surrounded by the flowers. I want to design four seasonal embroideries based around my paintings and drawings. I am also investigating and learning about miniature painting and sewing miniature embroideries. I would love to sew miniature portraits. Back to the stitching.

Hand embroidery

Hi, it has been a long time since I posted. I have had several courses running teaching watercolour painting and time has flown by. So far I have nearly completed the flowers for my hand embroidery design and will soon be adding the church covered with snow. I chose blue linen fabric for this design so that when I stitch the snow in white and silver it will show up nicely. I have used a variety of techniques to embroider the design. I stitched holly leaves using soluble fabric, with my sewing machine, ribbon embroidery and surface embroidery. The Hellebore flowers were stitched using ribbon embroidery and I used beads for the berries of the holly and mistletoe. I now just have the variegated ivy to finish.

New embroidery design and painting wedding bouquets

Happy New Year. It is a while since I posted but I have been very busy with Christmas and new year celebrations. All great fun. I haven't gone back to work yet, my courses start next week. I hope to change the direction of my Etsy shop BrushesAndBodkins and concentrate on hand embroidery including ribbon embroidery. I want to create my own embroidery designs that can then be customised with a message or embroidery of a favourite place or home. The card I created for my friend for her church gave me the idea for a set of embroideries based around the seasons. A customer can then have their own message or church, view or home embroidered in place of the church. I plan to create three further designs for spring, summer

and autumn.
             I have also added to my Art by CarolAnnHopper Etsy shop the facility to have your wedding bouquet  painted or your favourite flower(s) painted in watercolour. I hope to extend this to include painting wedding cakes and venues in watercolour. I have so far painted two wedding bouquets. These are really enjoyable to do.