I feel like I should start this blog by stating for the record that I don’t have a musical bone in my body. Don’t get me wrong, if a song comes on that I love then I will sing along and I love nothing better than singing my heart out in the car, but my husband says that I have the voice of an angel, on fire, plummeting to earth….
Putting that aside, when I started to develop these ‘blank canvas’ type fabrics I knew that I wanted to do a music one with the staves (staffs in the US) to make your stitching a little easier, after all, who really likes stitching lots of straight lines?! And here we finally are.
I also knew what song I wanted to stitch first. My husband and I walked back down the aisle after getting married to the Fun Loving Criminals singing ‘We have all the time in the world’ and I really wanted to capture that moment.
Getting started
So, how to get that music on to the fabric? Well, there are a few steps….
- Find the music! I simply did a google search for the sheet music and then extracted the lines that I wanted to stitch. I don’t know much about sheet music, but I have learnt that you’ll often see the music as two lines of staves, one with a treble clef and one with a bass clef. This is piano music I believe and looks good stitched as it’s nice and balanced, especially if there are words included in between the two rows.
- I then used the note templates that are included with the fabric to transfer the music to a design template – you can download it below. This template is at the same scale as the fabric so you can work out the best way to use the space. I found that I had to ‘squash up’ the notes a bit so that it wasn’t too long. I’m fairly sure that if some who could read music tried to play this line, it would sound terrible, but I looks good on the fabric!!
Top Tip
I first envisaged mounting the finished design in an oval hoop (horizontally), but this didn’t really work out because I simply couldn’t get it to fit, the music was just too wide. So my current plan is to finished the work off in a rectangular frame rather than a hoop. This freed me up from the constraint of the available oval hoop sizes and I know is going to look great. The layout of music definitely lends itself more to a square/rectangle than a circle/oval!
so, to continue…..
3. Once I was happy with the design on the template, I simply transferred it to the fabric using a Pilot frixion pen. Do this carefully as I learnt once again that these pens aren’t actually magic and do leave residue. I drew the very first note in the wrong place and used a hairdryer to remove it, but I can still see the mark. When I’ve finished the stitching I’m going to try and remove it so keep your fingers crossed for me!
4. Get stitching! I’m using mainly split stitch and then satin stitch to fill in the notes and I’m really pleased with it so far. I mostly use DMC stranded cotton and for this hoop I’m using black (310) and two strands of thread. As you can see in the picture below, remember that the whole design doesn’t have to fit in the hoop for you to stitch it, you can simply move the hoop around to suit.
And finally…
I hope that you enjoy using it! If you have any questions, please get in touch. Feel free to message me on Instagram or Facebook or you can email me at hello@littlelightstitchery.co.uk.
I would love to hear your ideas for how you are planning to use your fabric so comment on this blog or let me know through Instagram. And don’t forget to share your finished design! You can tag me as @littlelightstitchery in Instagram.
Happy Stitching!
Nicky x
