Tea for Two

Finally, an update!

I’ve been very busy lately – classes, friends, and family illness have (happily and unhappily) conspired against my free time – but I’ve also finally finished one of my many projects.

Last year I started working on a tea-themed cross-stitch for a good friend and fellow crafty person and tea-drinker. My cunning plan was to have it ready for her birthday and give it to her together with some tea (I sense an emerging theme here). Her birthday came and went, and I was nowhere near finished with this project (although I did give her a very nice tin of tea).

Although I’d tried little pre-packaged cross-stitch projects before, this was my first serious project.

First, I chose the design. I found an entire tea-themed cross-stitch design book on eBay a while ago, and this design was perfect, both because of its relative simplicity, and also because of the depicted scene – two women sitting down, facing each other, sipping tea. Well, in the original design only one woman was having tea – the other one was embroidering. The title of the design was “Thimble Tea”, which I decided to change to “Tea for Two”. Later I discovered that creating new letters in cross-stitch (that don’t look disproportionate or too blocky) is not exactly easy (although it’s fun, mathematically speaking).

Here you can see the original design and how it all began:

Here is the project at an intermediate stage. The main design is finished, but the border and the details are in progress here:

After finishing the cross-stitch component, I had to decide what to do with it, as I didn’t just want to give it to my friend as a piece of fabric. I didn’t want to get it traditionally framed either, as I don’t think it’s the right sort of design for that. So I decided to make it into a wall hanging by attaching it to a fabric “frame” made out of dark purple velveteen, which complements the bone-coloured aida fabric nicely:

The frame took a long time to make – I had to really think about how it was going to come together, how I was going to decorate it, and how to make it into an actual hanging. I used bamboo sticks for the top and bottom of the frame, to give it some structure and rigidity. I also had to be careful with my sewing as I wanted most of it to be “invisible”. The whole thing ended up being hand-sewn except for the hemming on the back cover, which is machine-sewn.

After many, many hours of work over a period of about a year, here is the finished wall hanging:

Details:

I used metallic silver thread to mark the corners of the dark purple frame, and I sewed a little silver metal heart charm in each corner section.

I used silver chain at the top of the frame as well as at the bottom. To the bottom chain I attached a fairly heavy metal teapot charm, and I used plum and rose round glass beads along the length of the chain.

I’m very happy with how it turned out. The only problem is that the cross-stitched fabric got a bit warped since I took so long to finish – in the future I will try to work faster and to store my sewing more carefully.