Today was a crazy, crazy rainy day.  Hours and hours and hours of rain, but we were inside happy, sunny and dry stitching with Kelly Clark!

Today and tomorrow were “Stitch with Kelly” days.  Two wonderfully relaxed days of stitching together, just us girls with a very talented designer friend.

Kelly arrived with ideas and parts of the canvas stitched.  We’ve experimented and revised a few things.  🙂 Okay, we couldn’t resist a few tweaks.  Could we?

The focal point of the topiary is the planter which is woven in a striped pattern.  First you attach wires bent and formed to create a semi-angular shape.

Real tools were needed for this.  So, now we need pliers, wire cutters and square nose pliers in our stitchy tool kits.  But I digress.

Kelly demonstrated the technique of laying in the warp threads for the weaving and then actually weaving the stripes.

It’s a little wonky when you first begin.  The wire is wiggling this way and the threads are wiggling that way.  I needed a third hand. That third hand is the orange perle cotton you see in the photo above.  I needed to put a little tension on the wire to keep it in place.  I think this is going to help.  We’ll see when I get back to it tomorrow.

This is Kelly’s oh-so-cool planter.  Hopefully mine will look half this good tomorrow.  Love the bun feet.

Kelly is a lovely, gracious, talented lady and we are loving every moment of stitching fun with her.

Until tomorrow……