November 1962: Star Motif Embroidery

The November 1962 issue had so many exciting projects that I wanted to make, but as I am woefully behind on so many other projects, I settled for a modern version of the cute embroidered tea cosy from this “star motif” cosy-and-tray-cloth set. The star design only really comes out on the tray cloth, where flowers with spiky leaf bases are embroidered in circles. The tea cosy has the flowers arranged individually in lines.

Since I don’t use tea cosies, I adapted the design as an iPad / tablet cosy, like I did with the “Gay Goslings” design from April 1960 and the “Posies for Cosies” from March 1961. I had plenty of green felt left over from the not-so-successful October 1960 “No Fun Fuchsia” project and enough scraps of embroidery floss in fitting colours to make everything from stash.

Obviously I didn’t have a transfer, but luckily this design is so simple that I was able to just draw around a coin with chalk for the flower heads and add in the stems freehand. I say “simple” and “just”, but the felt material was of a nature that chalk does not stick to it for more than a minute and the colour is too dark to draw on with a pencil or embroidery marking pen. My continuing incompetence in drawing, cutting or embroidering straight lines came back to haunt me! Oh well, that’s how you know it’s handmade.

The tea cosy has three rows of flowers: three in the top row, four in the second and five in the third. Not sure exactly how to scale the design for a tablet cosy, I started by embroidering two rows of flowers with three flowers in the top row and two in the bottom row. I didn’t like the asymmetry, so I filled in the gaps with more flowers aligned upside down.

Making it up into a bag was straightforward enough (except for the not being able to cut in straight lines thing, even using a ruler and template) and I finished it off with a vintage fabric-covered button from the button box. I’m quite happy with the result, even if the design is not entirely even and the buttonhole stitch pulls to the center of some of the flowers (not sure how to correct that.) And it went so fast! I did the embroidery last night and made it up into a bag this afternoon.

It looks very 1960s!

Since I still use and love my “gay gosling” iPad cover, I will send this one to a friend as a birthday/Christmas present.