This little piece of stitching came from a free cover kit from Needlecraft magazine, sometime in the late 1990s. I think - as was almost ubiquitious with these kits - it was made up into a card. I stitched it and gave it to my gran one birthday. As with everything I stitched for her, she kept it, and when she died five years ago, all these little pieces came back to me. Unfortunately, the card had been damaged, so I carefully took it off the mount - the margins were teeny tiny, as you can see - and kept it in my finishing box.
I didn't really know what to do with it - it wouldn't have made a pinkeep, for example - and the usual "four borders of fabric" pincushion seemed a little, well dull. And then, I remembered all those long pinpillows I'd seen on other people's blogs, and I knew that it would be a perfect finish for this! So off to my fabric stash I went...
I am not exaggerating when I say it probably took me as long to choose a fabric as it did to make the pillow - and I stitch everything by hand! Part of the problem is that rusts, purples and plums are my favourite colours. So I have a lot of fabric in those particular shades. And I really did want to use something from my stash - the reason why I was making this up was because I was snowed in, and couldn't get to the quilt shop which is normally only a 20 minute walk or 5 minute bus ride away down the hill. The hill being the problem...
In the end, I settled on this slightly distressed looking check, which reminded me a lot of a pinafore dress I used to have as a child.
The ribbon also came from my stash, and was originally a charity shop find. Again, it took a while to go through my box of trims to find something I was really happy with. Fortunately, when I showed it to The Hermit, his first comment was about how the ribbon sets it all off nicely so it's probably okay ;o)
This was the first of the finishing I need to do for The Year of the UFO, but I will have to stop for a few days as I have a heap of Uni work to do!
