Autumn is here.


Just back from our 11th trip to Pirapora close to Tropea in Calabria southern  Italy  Robert and I had a great week in Puglia before driving across from the east coast to pick up my stitching friends on the west coast to arrive at Pirapora.
 
Crossing from Puglia, interesting villages, churches and trulli houses but very flat we appreciated just how dramatic and beautiful the Calabria countryside is.  After a very wet summer it was amazingly green – fortunately the weather changed as we arrived and we enjoyed warm sun and blue skies for our whole visit.

On or trips to Tuscany , usually in April/May, we always have a design that everyone works, on this trip people are able to choose what they wish to stitch. Both work well, this year in Tuscany we all stitched the venue’s logo, a pair of pheasants under an olive tree;  in Calabria there was a wide range from a large wall hanging worked in silks on 18 mesh canvas to a hussif and all things in between.   Personally I worked on a group of Butterfly with a mixture of traditional solid stiches and shadow stitchery.

The Pheasants design called for rich metallic threads in basket weave tent ,the Olive Tree leaves in embroidery, and the backgrounds in both Skip Tent and a Patterned Darning with a fine stranded cotton and single ply of a metallic.

A hussif is traditionally a holdall/pouch containing all a soldier in the British Army might require for repairs to his clothing when necessary.  As you can see the needlepoint cover is a good rectangular shape to design for –Vivian, in this case chose  a geometric – it is the interior that can be as ambitious or not as one wishes.

The Scented Garden floral design has been worked previously as a rug on 14  mesh canvas but in this case Connie wanted a wall hanging so silks and floss were suitable for the finer canvas.  A photo of the 14 mesh version is on my 2017 blog ‘The Universal Problem’.

Two women from Belguim have joined us for a number of years and often bring the finished design from the last year.   Last year we enjoyed some Christmas scenes Marie-Louise had done and this year Christine brought her Elderflower panel finished as a fabric covered box top.
 

Fact sheets for both the Tuscany and the Calabria trips are available, the dates in 2019 are Tuscany 28 April – 5 May;   Calabria mid September to be finalised.  www.anna-needlepoint-pearson.com/

 

 

 

 

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