Sewing For The Greyhounds

Ever since adopting my greyhound Casey I have tried to support greyhound rescue charities in whatever way I could - either taking Casey along to greyhound rescue promotion events, attending fund raising dog shows, and of course donating items to the handmade4hounds shop on Etsy.

My local greyhound rescue, Greyhound Gap, will be running an auction for a week from the 3rd September. All the auction goodies have been donated, and already there are items being added to the on-line forum in preparation.

These are the 2 items I have been working on over the past few days for the auction:

Small embroidered greyhound picture, the hound profile is the logo for the Greyhound Gap charity:



Phone/gadget cover, featuring a greyhound profile:



The auction is being run to raise funds for one of Greyhound Gap's sponser dogs, Fleck. Greyhound Gap's founder, Lisa writes:

"Fleck is one of our sponsor dogs who landed in our care worse for wear, his ears had been home docked with scissors and his tail has undergone what we think seems to be a dodgy/home amputation. He was also very under weight with bite marks all around his ankles, they seem to be scars from possible rat bites and there is every chance that he has been left for a long number of years in a shed with minimal care.
Fleck also had co ordination problems and sadly recently he had a fall where he splayed himself out and hurt himself. This lead to us needing to investigate and it seems he may have a problem with compressed discs or disc damage at the lower end of his spine."

Read more on Fleck here.

Fleck will be undergoing his investigations on the 6th September. Lets hope the auction raises his much needed funds.

Buttons and Hounds

I love buttons.
This is a fact.
I have boxes of buttons, bags of buttons, some new, some old, some faded, some gifted, some treasured.
So while thinking of a new picture for daughter's bedroom, it wasn't long before the buttons came to mind, and a joint project began.
One box of buttons, one tube of glue, one ikea white picture frame and the finished result -



Both myself and daughter have sorted buttons together for a few years now, and making this picture together, and hanging it in her newly decorated room, felt good. It now takes pride of place, hanging above the little black fireplace (and the restoration of that is another story...)



Making a picture for a child's room also led me to think about other ways to create wall decor that steps away from the twee and the predictable, and maybe how my hounds (or at least their images!) can find their way into bedrooms in a soothing sleep encouraging way. Over the past week I have been working on my latest wall art, the Greyhound at Night, now added to my etsy shop.



Which I think would be perfect for any age bedroom, surely the comfort of a hound guarding over you at night would help send you into happy dreamland. Made from a wonderful starry fabric, with the instructions to "shh..." embroidered next to a sleeping moon.

An Itch To Stitch

Its a strange time at the moment - caught between selling and buying a house, things in boxes, things not in boxes, life in limbo. I felt I needed to distract myself from scouring the web for sites such as "how to move house in 10 easy steps" or for waiting to accost the postman each morning for any letter that might speed up the process.

So I had to find a way to "step away, nothing to see here" and embroidery was that way. Last year I was given some of Jenny Hart's Sublime Stitching books and kits and it didn't take me long to get back into the swing of a little gentle sewing. Embroidery is therapeutic, I curl up on my red chair, feet tucked beneath me, sink back into the cushions, thread a needle and sew sew sew. There is something about the order of sewing, the rhythm, that slows your breathing and thoughts down into a calmness that is so needed right now.

This is the work in progress:





If you're new to embroidery, the Jenny Hart books are excellent - they include a load of transfer patterns that you just iron onto your fabric (I love using linen and linen-type materials). The instructions for the stitches are also very well written - even the French knot can be mastered with ease!



You can find her books on Amazon, but the Sublime Stitching website has a wealth of other patterns and kits too.