Tenar’s cave

By Jowynn , and I feel honoured, although these are not exactly the kind of questions I would like to anwer in public. So these are the questions:

1. What was I doing ten years ago?
2. Five things on my To Do list today
3. Snacks that I enjoy
4. Things I would do if I were a billionaire
5. Places I’ve lived

1)
Hard to say, that feels like ages ago. I was 25 then, and my CV says it was my second year of study at university. So it was about two months before my first really important examn, and I was studying like mad because statistics said that 60% of applicants will fail, and you get only 3 stabs at it. On top of that, the regular end of term examns were still ahead, and I needed to pass them all to be admitted to the big examn. I remember it was a wonderful summer, and my family just couldn’t understand why I was brooding over books all the time instead of going out and doing stuff with them. I did allright on all those examns, so it was worth the resulting quarrels with them.

2)
It’s sunday and I’ve got a cold as I write this, so my to do list isn’t 5 things long. All I really wanted to do was to write a blog post or two, what I hereby did, laze about and drink lots of ginger tea, what I did either.

3)
Basically anything greasy or sweet and decidedly unhealthy. Potato crisps and similar snacks in all tastes and forms. French fries and burgers. Icecream, chocolate and so on. I’m so glad I don’t put on weight easiely. I do like vegetables and fruit, but they are not what I’m really craving, especially not when it comes down to frustration eating.

4)
I honestly don’t know. At my very core I am a lazy person, so I guess this wouldn’t end pretty. Probably I’d get myself a comfortable little house with a nice garden and spend the rest of my life tending the roses or sitting in the sun drinking beer. I would sure buy myself more expensive toys than I do now, but not different ones. Of course I would donate some money, and make some half-hearted attempts to do halfway useful stuff like getting better at arts and crafts, but I guess that would be it.

5)
Basically, I spent most of my life in the same little backwater town in Bavaria, Germany where I grew up and still live. Naming this one would tell too much about me since it’s small. I commuted to bigger towns nearby for study or work most of the time, sometimes I even had to get a room for the week where I worked, but I never could overcome my inertia and really move somewhere else. I’m not even especially in love with this place, more like convinced that the world isn’t any different somewhere else, but a lot less convenient and familiar.

now I’m supposed to tag 5 other people. That’s difficult, since I don’t know who has alredy been tagged and who not, and who likes to be tagged and who not. Like always with those things, my selection is kinda random.

Barbara Cheeseman at embroidery overlaps
Dijanne Cevaal at musings of a textile itinerant
The dancing crow
Val’s musings
Paula Hewitt at the beauty of Life

So time has proven TIF is kinda too much for me at the moment. All it does is make me start more wips I don’t have time or energy to finih really. Sorry for that. I know I have to stop being this haphazard. So i decided to sign up for something actually doable for me, that would be Sharon’s new challenge, stitch along. All you have to do is try out stitches from a list. I decided to do something really basic and quick this time. So I got 1 meter of this prefabricated aida band. I hemstitched both ends because on such a small scale, this is less of a hazzle than hauling out the sewing machine for me. On second thought, I should have done nun stitch and a fringe on the lower end, it’s on the list, after all. Well I still can undo the hem and go this route if I really want to.

This is not going to be a real sampler, more of a doodle cloth. Probably I’ll roughly do the stitches alphabetically, but I’ll leave out the pulled stitches for now and everything else that doesn’t work on Aida. Also I might leave out stitches I have explored in depth before. This is about learning, not about showing off I guess.

Well, here is the to end. I wahted to stitch “stitch along” on top, then realized that this might be an unfair case of starting early, since chain stitch is on the list either.

I’m sorry you didn’t hear from em for long. Stuff like back pain, a cold and my job kept me from posting, and the few days I was well I went out to enjoy the nice weather. However, I did do a little bit of craft. I finished the fot pink doily. Well, here it is. The design is not that good, but I didn’t want it to grow too much more, so I finished off quickly. As you can see, I used a new thread that is slightly differen, couldn’t get hte original one any more.

I’ve also been to the botanical garden last weekend, but I’m not sure you wnat to see any more photographs.

Click on the picture to enlarge!

I finally got round to compiling the pictures from last weekend into a post-worthy form. I am so obsessed with my new camera! I know these shots are far from good, but it is not easy to concentrage on complicated menues and capturing life animals at the same time. please be patient, my next post will be about fiber again. Promised! Click on the pictures for enlarged versions.

The first one is a dead snail and a few bugs busy eating it. This one saw no editing exept shrinking and sharpening. With Gimp, you usually have to sharpen the pics after shrinking them.

The next one is a crayfish, my mum is holding it into the camera. It is not very big but very “pregnant”, the stuff under the tail is eggs. Of course we let her go again after taking the pic. It was shrunk, sharpened and somewhat brightened.

The next one is the best imho. I think this little fish is called bullhead in Englich (German: Groppe). It is about as long as a thump. It was somewhat cropped abd heaviely edited to make the fish more visible because I couldn’t get so near, and there are ugly reflections from the water. I didn’t want to drag a fish out of the water just for a picture, so I had to wait until it came out under the stones and take a picture through the water.

The last one is ugly on so many levels. It is a bad photograph, because obviously it is hard to take pictures from something in the water, and quite far away. The turtle it shows is an American species that has no business swimming in the ponds here, eating all the fish and frogs. Some dumpass has dropped their turtle there after it got too big. Or it is already a descendant of such animals. It is sure not the turtle’s fault, but it is bad anyway.

So I got round to something halfway creative this weekend either. I worked a bit on this acrylic picture. It is supposed to be something halfway between a water swirl and an abstract spiral. I started it as an experiment about working with little glass beads and mirror shards embedded in acrylic gel. It took ages because I had to add the embedded stuff in multible sessions to avoid accidentally ruining my own work again and it always took long to dry. I’m not entirely shure if I’ll leave it as is or give it some finishing toughes.

Sorry you didn’t hear from me for a long time. I feel kinda uncreative these days. I finally made a decision and treated myself with a digital camera - this one. Time will tell if the decision to spend that much money on a compact camera was good, but right now I’m in love with it.

Yesterday I saw this exhibition about the table silver of the Russian Tsars and used the opportunity to try out the “museum mode” of the camera. The Exhibition itself was interesting because it had loads of history, but most of the silver shown was too baroque for my taste. I’m showing one shot and a detail of the same. The shot is technically a failure, seems I moved the camera too early after pressing the button - it has 4 seconds max time for a shot, and flashlight was not allowed in the museum. But it still shows the details of that silver plate niceky and I like it’s athmosphere. Anyway, it is amazing you can take pictures there at all, with bad light and through glass. My long-dead analog camera wasn’t able to do that. please click on the pictures to enlarge.

Well, I have been thinking about tif 5 some more. This is some stuff I’m going to use. The yarn colours are the ones Pam Kellogg suggests. Then there is the pulled thread tulip and that crocheted doily.
It is made from simple polyester sewing thread. Unfortunately I’m out of that special thread and the motif is nowhere near complete. The center was from a commercial source the rest was made up as I went. I think it was the very same thread I used for my very first lace crochet exercises after Grandma had given me an appropriate crochet hook. I started this about 5 years ago when I was lovesick. Just don’t ask, lol. I’m not sure if I will finish it using a similar thread or just use it as is. I guess this also counts as Ufo finishing/stash using.
The fabric is pure linen and was horrribly expensive. I saw it at the shop where I bought the floss and fell in love.

The picture will increase in size when you click it.

I did a quick sketch about ideas for my tif 5 Project. The thing on the left is my pulled thread tulip, which is done by now. The thing on the right is a crocheted doilie I’m planning to use because it is pink. Sadly, I don’t have as much time for craft as I used to have, and I like to be outdoors in this nice spring weather, so I have to bore you with such sketches to have anything to show at all.

By the way, the ladder hem on my tif 3 sampler is finished. Slow cloth like this and the tulip make my blog stats go down the drain because they look boring for a long time while being a lot of work. Maybe I am too blog stats obsessed.

Have you seen that my blog has two new pages? I’m trying to get more organized. On the project index page I will list posts belonging to one project,so you cann follow the progress of something you like easier. On the tutorials and how-tos opage I will list tutorials in the widest sense, so they won’t disappear in the archives.

The topic of this month’s take it further challenge is “What do you call yourself? (related to what we do). Artist or Craftsperson?

Basically, that’s the old art versus craft debate taken to a personal level. My first thought was “Why, I’m just a dabbler anyway”. But I guess that answer would be the easy way out.

I dabble in acrylic paint and watercolour, so I can well call myself an artist. But on the other hand, where is the line between art and craft in paintings? Are paintings in the style of the home decor TV shows art? In fiber, I do a few original things. But I also love doing crafty things like knitting, crochet and mindless embroidery. I think I never really defined myself beyond “dabbler in xyz”, replace xyz with my current subject of study. Maybe it’s high time I think about such things a bit.

I don’t really know yet what I’m going to do about that topic, but I think it screams for another sampler, showing the artsy and the crafty sides of me.

The colour scheme is another interesting case. The official me hates it but I think my inner child loves it.

To add a bit of eye candy, here is another progress shot of the pulled thread tulip. If I really do a sampler this will be part of it. Sometimes things just fall into place like this. This ttime, the picture is not clickable, I’ll upload a really big one when it’s finished.

I have been working on that wild tulip a bit more. This is so against my good intentions for this year - I didn’t want to start anything not TIF related. But at least I will try to finish it so I can put it into the bits an pieces box without bad conscience. This time you can click on the picture for a bigger version.

I finally had some ideas and a piece of fabric for the april TIF, but now April is over. Maybe I’ll do it anyway maybe not. I will need some time to think about the new one, get threads and so on for some time anyway, so maybe next weekend…