A cottage in the hills

It was heading towards November and I was wondering what sort of card to do for my mum’s birthday. Initially I had planned on making something like the embroidered otter I made for my other half — I even had a mouse pattern from the same company. But when I stitched it, well, it’s not that I didn’t like it exactly, but it definitely didn’t fill me with joy. And adding colour to it didn’t help. So I abandoned it. It’s not often I completely give up on a card but this was one of those times.

And, to be honest, I had been thinking about doing something else even before I started the mouse. I’d made a little layered landscape for my brother’s birthday and I was definitely feeling like I should make one for mum too.

So I went back to my sketchbook of landscapes, went through some more of my old photos and added a few more landscape layouts to it, pondered a bit, and eventually chose one to base the card on. I also went back to the Stitch a Little Landscape class and watched the rest of the videos, including the ones that covered adding buildings.

I had my design, I picked my fabrics and threads, and I started sewing. When it came to creating the cottage I paused; Karen suggests a couple of ways of using fabric to add buildings, but I’d picked a problematic fabric. The fabric that I’d chosen for the cottage was comparatively thick and loose-woven which, honestly, wasn’t ideal, but with the addition of some Terial Magic it became a nice stiff material that would stand up to careful handling and sewing without immediately fraying to bits.

I cut out the cottage shape, drew on the structural lines and used Inktense pencils to add colour to the roof and shade on the front wall. Even with the fabric stiffened I didn’t want to sew too near the edges, so I attached it into the landscape by its door and windows. I used metallic thread for the windows to give the impression of light reflected. The pan tiles on the roof were “fun” to do — my brain refuses to remember how to start blanket stitch and I have to work it out every time I use it.

Other fun things my brain was responsible for include “hey, you’ve still got loads of green thread [after adding texture to the trees on the hill], and that tree behind the cottage is looking a bit rough around the edges… why don’t you add tiny blanket stitch around it?”

My other half suggested repeating the image in outline on the inside of the card; I liked that idea, but in the end I went for the simpler option of choosing a detail from the landscape, printing a fainter version of it, and using that as an insert.

Things I particularly like: the sheep (of course), the smoke from the chimney (tiny stitched swirls over a tiny scrap of cocoon silk), and the mass of flowers in the foreground (even if they do almost completely obscure the fence I carefully made behind them).

Loved the process, love the result. And my mum was suitably impressed too.