New

New Knitty issue is out and I'm... so dissappointed!...
I like only one project, namely the Clessidra socks, all the rest is either not for me (I don't have a child, although looking at the patterns I wish I had, they're cute!) or not interesting. Well...

On the other hand, my new embroidery project is very interesting (for me *^v^*) and it goes well. This is the second Wordpicture called 'the tree' - 'drzewo'. I managed to piece the background together and add a tree shape and the word onto it. Now the fun part begins - I'm going to sit down and look at it for a while, and then the first stitch will come to my mind, so I'll take a needle, choose the proper colour of the thread and I will start the new adventure... *^v^*

And this week I'm going to sow the seeds of these beauties! *^v^* I hope they will grow nice and strong, and in the middle of May I will plant them into the soil on my parents' allotment. Keep your fingers crossed because the tray with the seeds will be placed on my bedroom windowsill, the favourite spot for my kitty to lay on and she especially likes laying on the soil, so I often find her in my plant pots (plants squished and moved to the side)!...

Wordpictures finished!

How, on Earth, do you take pictures of something behind the glass?...
That is all I could achieve with my quite a good Fuji camera and my Wordpictures mounted behind the glass and black passepartout (to protect them from the dust).
Not to mention that I've been processing the photos not with the good old PaintShop Pro, but with Gimp (because we are changing our home operating systems from Windows to Linux and I've been working on Ubuntu for the last few days...).



Anyway, my tryptych has been finished, now I just have to buy the proper nails and hand them on the wall above our bed. Please forgive the flash reflexes seen on the glass, there was nothing I could do about it.

I had a busy weekend - on Saturday we attended my aunt's wedding and I caught some cold so Sunday was slow and lazy at home, with my friend Anna visiting us, some knitting and a lot of thinking and planning for the next two embroidery projects: the first one is the linnen tree on the patchwork background and the second one is the representation of all the chakra colours, but let's keep some secrets for later! ^^

BTW, Helene, I've finished the missing leaves on the "Burgundy Dance" tapestry, now I only need to finish the black background. *^v^*
Rho, don't worry, I often find some UFOs in different places, maybe I will find the one for you, too! ^^

Ukrainian wise women and TAST

First, some replies to your comments:
Rho, thank you for your book suggestion, I've just got a copy of "The Secret" and will be listening to it in the near future. BTW, audiobooks are great! I can put them on and knit or embroider, or do whatever I want/need to do while listening to something interesting, yikes! ^^
Lobstah, I was also afraid that without a specific pattern I will ruin the overall picture with senseless stitches here and there but to my surprise, when I sit at the table and look at my panels I somehow know what to do next, what stitches to use, what colours, and it all composes a fairly consistent picture (at least I think so! *^v^*).
Corina, thank you for your sweet comment about my embroidery, I've been to your blog and I found many beautiful projects there, it's a shame I cannot speak Romanian...
Kendra, it's not that complicated as it sounds, I hope next time warping and weaving will be easier, maybe I just went straight into the deep water with the linnen warp, I should have started with wool instead. But I'm not discouraged at all and next weaving session is coming (I hurt my finger and could try again on Monday morning).

On Monday evening we went to watch a special movie - the document presenting old Ukrainian customs connected with several holidays: laments over the grave and feasting with the dead, Kust - the festival of Life, the holy tree, Rusalki - the festival of the dead wandering spirits, and in all of these customs the main part played beautiful songs, with traditional lyrics and melodies, sung a capella by the old women. Sad thing is that the only ones interested in preserving those customs are old women, because all the young ones leave their villages as quickly as possible and move to towns, so they change their lives completely and forget about their traditions.

But this movie was also great because I could see the traditional Ukrainian embroidered outfits - blouses, skirts and aprons, snowwhite with colourful flowers, all cross-stitched.

And because there are no such things as coincidences, this week stitch in the TAST is the very cross stitch itself! *^v^*

I've been having a love affair with this stitch for a long time now and I've done many projects in this technique, like pictures (my favourite is the Four Seasons cycle) or cushion covers with flowers on them. I also tried the traditional Ukrainian motives, like these bands on the photo, I haven't decided what to do with them yet.

I thought this stitch had no secrets for me, but I've never tried it in any free-hand embroidery, and when I looked up cross stitch family in Susan's stitch dictionary I found something interesting: namely the Rice stitch. I've achieved the similar result with Feather stitch or Cretan stitch, but it also looks interesting in this stitch and I'll give it a go soon.

My three panels are getting very crowded with motives and stitches, but I feel that this should be the case. I believe I need another week or so to finish them, and then I'll proceed to the next embroidery project (I have two in mind already, but I really want to make them one by one! ^^) .


(More photos on my Flickr).

And here are two books that I've been given be my Grandmother, showing everything she knew about embroidery (just look at them, they were used millions of times and the first one is in pieces, although not a single page is missing! ^^): the first one is about many types of embroidery, with individual stitches and some small patterns; the second one teaches a beautiful type of embroidery from the region of Poland called Kaszuby (close to the Baltic sea) - characteristics are: it's done on the grey linnen with only a few colours - black, two shades of red, blue, green and yellow, and white, and the motives are the flowers.

TAST contd

First things first, replies to my commentators from yesterday ^^:

Rho, my hair is dark red indeed, it was a black wig! *^v^* I sometimes wear wigs just for fun, or for pictures. I believe Polish for you sounds like, for example, Hungarian of Finnish for me - I'm totally lost with these two!

Kendra, it will be some time before these pieces are finished! ^^ But I'm very excited about this new concept and I put away other things for now, so I hope it won't be long before I can show you the final result. I think I should include the audio files with pronunciation of these words, it would make the pieces complete in a way. I'll think about it! *^v^*

Okay, yesterday I managed to embroider the first panel with the word "to create". For now I used the following stitches: herringbone, buttonhole, feather and fly, and I'll be adding the other stitches from the previous TAST weeks soon, as well as other simple stitches.

I am generally very excited, I totally forgot how great it is to sit with a needle in one hand and a piece of cloth in the other and 'paint' the picture with colourful threads! ^^ And, to be honest, I've never tasted the pleasure of freehand embroidery like the one I'm making right now, I always embroidered some picture, so I had to stick to the outlines and colours, not to mention the cross-stitching, where following the scheme is all that counts! Maybe that's why I'm a bit shy with adding any new elements to my panels (like aplique, ect), but I hope to warm up and do it at some stage! *^v^*

I already have more ideas for the next pieces (three at least), but I'm holding back because I don't want to stay with many WIPs. My first tryptych is my priority now, and anyway I've run out of a transfer paper which is neccessary for the next projects ^^, so for now I'll be a good girl and continue my first idea.

Robert carefully examined my embroidery last night (he was thinking about using those stitches to decorate our medieval clothing but I believe they were invented much later, apart from a buttonhole stitch), and asked whether I was making a sampler. I thought about it and the answer was "no, it's not a sampler", because I had in mind the traditional sampler, with neat rows of different stitches one after another but then it occurred to me that it is a sampler in some way. Which led me to the idea of making my own stitch sampler book with pieces of fabric and examples of the stitches with all their possible variations. I have some sheets of handmade paper which can be good for a base notebook and all I need is to learn bookbinding! Piece of cake! *^v^*

I found this very helpful site with video instructions for many stitches: Needle'n'Thread. If you are, like myself, the person who best learns not from a description but from watching the process itself, this is the place to go for stitch instructions! ^^