WIPW - What is a 'Kafferep'?

If you want to see actual WIPW results head over to Pintangle. This link will take you there.

My Work In Progress Wednesday report this week is stitch free. Instead, before actually progressing on the UFO, 'Kafferepet', I pulled out of the cupboard last week, I will give you some background to this quilt.

What is a 'Kafferep'? Well, it is a traditional Swedish 'tea party', with the exception that coffee is served instead of tea (Swedes run on coffee). You have probably already figured out that 'kaffe' is the Swedish word for coffee!

For the Partnership Quilt project at Tokyo International Great Quilt Festival 2008 the theme was TEA TIME and each block should have something to do with 'having a cuppa'. There were blocks with tea cups, latte mugs, cakes, kettles, instant coffee jars, tea bags...

My contribution was a block with a Swedish platter of home made biscuits and a bun. (excuse the poor quality of the mobile phone photograph)

I enjoyed making this block so much that I thought I'd make a full quilt, called Kafferepet' and featuring all the things that make up a real gossipy gathering around the coffee table.

This UFO was started in the summer of 2007, so it is high time it got finished.

Today let me talk about the biscuits:

They are 'Vaniljhjärta' a soft biscuit, shaped like a heart and filled with custard, 'Uppåkra' where a bit of the top is folded over, 'Syltkaka' with a dot of raspberry jam in the centre, a 'Strassburgare' is a biscuit that has been piped and dipped in chocolate after baking, 'Gaffelkaka' has the imprint of a fork, 'Schackruta' has got its name from a chessboard and in the middle is 'Chokladsnitt', a chocolate flavoured thing sprinkled with coarse sugar and cut into diamond shapes (a TAST #60 biscuit!!!)

The 'chessboard' is pieced, the others are appliquéd, the forky one has pleats and the Strassburgare is ruched. There are a few scraps of fabric to make crumbs and French knots for the sugar and almond. One great advantage with these tea time treats is that they are totally non calorific and the only allergic reaction is a possible craving for appliquéing more of them!

Tuck in!

TAST #60 Re-cut Diamond Stitch

In my last post I joked about sending my badly cut (stitched) Diamond Stitches off to Amsterdam to be cut (stitched) perfectly.

It did not take long before I got expert advice from Annet in Holland how to manage the stitch. I sat down and worked a new row of grey stitches. Look at the improvement. They are not PERFECT but definitely a better, more even diamond shape. THANK YOU, Annet!

TAST #60 Diamond Stitch

TAST stitch #60 is called Diamond Stitch.

Diamonds might be 'a girl's best friend', but the Diamond Stitch is not this girl's best friend! What a teaser, a real trickster...

On my sampler below I have a selection of real rough diamonds - off to Amsterdam with you to get a proper cut! I know several Dutch ladies who can hone anything with needle and thread!

 Right now I am taking the Sumptuous Surface Embroidery course, and this week I worked a few samplers for my study journal. On one of them I tried out the Diamond Stitch again and with the aid of waste canvas underneath the tension was slightly easier to control.

Used as a filling stitch this could be good to depict a fishing net - a well-used one where you can see through which holes the fish have escaped, ha, ha!

WIPW - relaunching 'Kafferepet'

WIPW, Work In Progress Wednesday, read here what it is and what others have accomplished.

My ACTUAL work in progress just now is a birthday card and the fantastic online course Sumptuous Surface Embroidery by Sharon.
The former is a needle painting job that I don't want to show just yet, sorry.
The latter is keeping me busy studying. Sharon has supplied us with a course material of about 200 pages, jam packed with theories, examples and advice as well as lots of new stitches. Right now we are working on colour and this is an area where I have no previous 'academic' knowledge (although I have tried to grasp the theory of colour from other books in the past). It it by actually LOOKING, MATCHING, COMPARING and WORKING examples that I have begun to understand colour. Until now I have used my intuition or gut feeling. I hope the course will improve my sense of colour and also be a support when I reach a 'colour block' and feel I have got stuck in a rut.

So what progress can I show you? The simplest of simple: I have taken an old UFO quilt top out of the cupboard! Great progress, eh?

The title of this quilt is 'Kafferepet' and its theme should be obvious to any Swedish reader. You might notice the colours of the Swedish flag, some summer flowers,  a famous pattern on the china and to the initiated e.g, anyone who has joined in a 'kafferep', the corner of a checkerboard patterned thing on the plate...
More of the history of this 'flimsy' quilt top next week, when I also hope to show you some actual progress!