When I was in grade school, my favorite aunt came to visit. She and my mother bought a pretty fabric with lots of horses in fields, under trees, jumping over fences, etc. and basted a sheet of muslin on the back side. Then my aunt basted around the larger horses' outlines by hand. Turning the fabric over to the muslin side, she carefully slit the center of the muslin inside each horse outline, stuffed it with cotton batting, and sewed up the slit. When you turned back to the front, each horse was dimensional. The fabric was framed and hung in my parents' house for years until finally it went off in a yard sale after my father's death when Mom decided she needed to get rid of a lifetime's accumulation of things and move to a smaller house. But I remember the process well. The trick my aunt said was to hand stitch many tiny straight stitches around the shapes, then stuff each shape enough to make them pop up appropriately. That took time and effort because of the tiny legs, heads and tails of the horses.
You can imagine how interested I was when I saw this and wondered if Ruth was channeling my aunt!
http://www.notyourgrandmothersneedlepoint.com/2012/08/poofy-heart.html
Now Linda B. confirms that Ruth really is my aunt reincarnated.
http://splittheneedles.blogspot.com/2012/09/love-me-do.html
Wonder if my Day of the Dead lady needs a trapunto necklace...?
Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
and at http://chstitchguides.blogspot.com
