Friday 5 August 2016

Embroidery transfers and drawing your own ....










The lovely flowers embrace me
and they make me regret that I 
am not a bee.

Emily Dickinson 1864









When talking embroidery or indeed stitching in a less formal sense what is best transfers or drawing your own?

Well I draw most of what I do myself but I enjoy drawing and enjoy designing and I can draw so it makes my life easy in that sense.  Now I am no Monet so lets just say that here and now but I can
draw a bird or a flower and do not have much of a problem with it.  If you can not draw at all and or do not want to give it ago then a transfer is a god send and the vintage ones are really beautiful I must say.  I love to design different and unusual in a way.  Enjoying my own little touch.

I enjoy adding a tiny bee to a foxglove or adding little cornflowers at its feet so I like to draw my own on to the linen and then stitch.

That said I enjoy using vintage transfers and find them really useful and great, I used some on a flannel for a friend for her little boy and they were three ducks splashing in puddles and were a little cartoon-ish in a way.


 He was not liking his bath time much and even worse hair wash time and it had become a nightmare in their home but he seems to like ducks so I did him a special 'hold over the eyes flannel' for hair wash time, which was proving difficult and this has seemed to do the trick!  The coloured transfers I just bought have some ducks in there but he was really pleased with the ducks splashing in the puddles as they had wellie boots on!  Well when you are three its all important!


You also get unusual and different transfers in the vintage packs and of course as you know I bought a bundle of them from Tilly-D at the Giant VB Jumble last weekend and I have manage to look
through them.  Thought you might like to see some of them.  I carefully undid the ribbon on the bundle that I bought and have opened them up for you to see throughout this blog.  I am particularly pleased with the transfers with birds .. they are beautiful.

The coloured transfers are very unusual I am told and so it gives you an idea of colours for anyone
who maybe is just starting out doing embroidery and can then they can get an idea of what colours to use.

There are so many to choose from and you have to build up a great selection over time.  There can be something like 30 shades of green just in one particular make.  The picture of the coloured ones are above left.


You can see on the book of transfers on the left the date on them is for October 12th 1935 and these are the bird ones that I am very very pleased with.








You may have spotted the name on this picture of the transfer pack, that of Norman Hartnell, who
was a designer for the Queen and other members of the Royal household and so these are very special
indeed and I will probably leave these untouched, although I did do a blog about how to use them, without using them ...

So Sir Norman Hartnell at the end designed these lovely transfers for embroidery and I am very excited to have them as part of my collection ...








Then in amongst this gorgeous bundle of delights that I bought from  Jenny of Tilly-D there were some newspaper pages that had been cut out for their embroidery contents and I have those too,
which is lovely.  I not only had a look at those but the adverts of the time and what was going on.  I love old newspapers as you can learn so much about the era they were printed in.  In this case it was the early 1930's and the publication was Weldon's Ladies Journal.  This was a famous ladies paper in its time and was started by Walter Weldon who was not only a chemist but later into publishing, I have found out.  Here is a colour photo of one of the journals ..



So you see to use beautiful transfers from earlier decades is a fun and beautiful thing to do or indeed you can design your own embroidery designs.  In addition you could iron on a vintage transfer and then add to it ... anything goes and anything is possible its what is in our minds and imagination.

I hope you have enjoyed today's ramblings, where has the week gone?  We have had lots of rain this week but I must say it has done the garden the world of good... but would like our summer back for next week if possible....

Have a great day and as always Happy Stitching! XX



4 comments:

  1. Oooooh! transfers. I love transfers too, and have quite a few also
    Julie xxxxxx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Well that was such an interesting read Sarah, I really enjoyed it. I love the 1930s and the music too. Norman Hartnell, what an icon, he seems far too famous to design some little embroidery patterns. Precious things indeed. Xxx

    ReplyDelete
  3. Well that was such an interesting read Sarah, I really enjoyed it. I love the 1930s and the music too. Norman Hartnell, what an icon, he seems far too famous to design some little embroidery patterns. Precious things indeed. Xxx

    ReplyDelete
  4. Well that was such an interesting read Sarah, I really enjoyed it. I love the 1930s and the music too. Norman Hartnell, what an icon, he seems far too famous to design some little embroidery patterns. Precious things indeed. Xxx

    ReplyDelete