Brazilian Bliss

Welcome to our very first post - its exciting to finally have our own blog.  As we are now well into April, I thought it would be nice to give you a little peek at the things we have been doing so far this year.
Why Brazilian Bliss? Our first workshop of the year in January was Brazilian Work with our very talented Sue Bennet.
Having never heard of Brazilian work before I was intrigued and looking forward to our meeting. This kind of embroidery seems to have taken its name from the very bright colours that we associate with Brazil.
Take a look at two samples of Sue's work.

The main stems are in Stem Stitch with background foliage in Couching with French Knots for the tiny yellow flowers.

Leaves in Satin Stitch and flower centres are French Knots. Flower petals could be either Bullion Stitch as shown opposite in Sue's lovely piece ( forgive the reflections and my shadow - its difficult to photograph framed work behind glass in the evening with overhead lighting).

Or the easier Pistil Stitch or a medium level Bullion Lazy Daisy Stitch (sorry I couldn't get a clear photo of the latter).

Sue had made things much easier for us by providing us with fabric ready marked out with the design and a worksheet showing diagrams of all the stitches. She does work very hard making sure we can get down to stitching as soon as possible without wasting time on preparation.




This is Sue's sample in Pistil Stitch using variegated peach/pink threads to great effect.

We all started with the stems and leaves.  The background foliage was next and I really enjoyed couching the thread for the stems as it grew very fast. This was in one strand only, all other stitches used the normal 2 strands of floss.

The whole thing was very fast to stitch so everyone enjoyed it immensely. We started at the meeting on Wednesday and by Friday afternoon mine was finished. I think sometimes it is refreshing to start and finish a small piece quickly instead of it taking forever and ending up being a UFO and being added to the 'Guilt List'.
Here is my example below using Bullion Bullion Stitch. This was the last bit to stitch and I had to stick a circle of iron on Vilene behind my main flower as holes were beginning to appear in my fabric and it was in danger of disintegrating! 

Don't laugh at my leaves.......

That's all for now...... Happy Stitching!