Springtime walk

Today the weather was nice, I was lazy, so I decided to take a walk arround a nearby lake with my Mum instead of stitching feverishly, as I probably should. I took along my brother’s camera and took a few random shots. I don’t know it well, so the only things that turned out good were the shots in the automatic flower mode.Here is a random selection. The last one is of course a garden flower, a primrose. Sorry I don’t know the English names of the others.

frustration shopping – and a stitched wild tulip

Working is bad. It eats time you should spend drinking beer and watching trash TV, or even do the really important things in life, such as blogging.

I worked on the hemstitched background but I’m not yet done. I went shopping when work got at me and saw this beautiful fine linen cheescloth. Again for only one quarter of what similar fabric would cost in the needlework corner of the same shop, so I got 3 meters. Then of course I had to try what I can do with it. I did a little tryout piece. I know it’s nothing special, but I did all of it on the commute so I had to do with a little impromptu scetch of a wild tulip and such stitches as I know by heart.

Edit:
I bought two paintbrushes and a black copic marker on the same occasion either, as if I haven’t too much art supplies already. And now I stumbled about a post by Paula Hewitt about affluenza, the lifestyle of having too much. I find good reasons for buying more and more fabric whenever the fabric shop has cheap stuff. I guess I must be more careful, or I’ll end up with one of these huge mountains of stash so many people lament about.

tif 3 – the background fabric

Yes, my blog has got a new look. I just couldn’t see the old theme any more, I wanted something more clean. I’m not really happy that I ended up with one of the most used themes now, but it is definitely one of the best. All others that I might have liked were too narrow and ate parts of my old pictures, making the posts look odd. Now I’ll nave to find out how to change the header picture, and design something decent. I will have to learn CSS one day to be able to have a more customised theme, but I’m too busy for that now.

But now to business. I wrote before you will get to see the background fabric for my tif 3 sampler, and here it is. It is a cheap non-evenweave 100% Linen that was sold for clothes and such. You do get perfect evenweave that looks similar, but for thrice the price. So this one will have to do. I folded the edges and I’m busy doing a ladder hemstitch all arround without any machine sewing. This was the traditional hem for almost all decent needlework in my area one or two generation ago. It takes a lot of time, but I find it is a very peaceful and soothing activity, I love doing it.
It looks a bit untidy because I didn’t hide any loose ends yet. The side shown is traditionally the wrong side, but I will use it as right side because it shows how the hemstitching and the corners are done. Details of my craft. I think this will also be the title of the finished piece.
I have finished the first round, but t is aproximately 50*90 cm in size so this step will keep me busy for another week. “Good things like to take their time” as we say here.

tif 3 – and another scrap

I’m sorry I don’t post more these days. It was another completely crazy week at work, but I do keep stitching on the commute. Tomorrow you’ll get a glimpse at my background fabric, I promise.

Now this was made from two unconnected strips of jute band which were melted together with three layers of polyester organza by ironing. That worked extemely well. It is not a really beautiful scrap, but it was an interesting experiment.

tif 3 – jet another set of scraps

So wordpress made some changes to their new image uploading process – it is slowly getting more comfortable. So I post a few more scraps. These were also treated with the heat gun, but they were not melted brutally but heated carefully from both sides to avoid curling. Obviously, the temperatures needed to melt this kind of kunin felt I have would burn away about anything else. I begin to think that it contains heat guarding chemicals or something.

The first scrap is a strip of green organza, lutradur and lazy daisies stitched with knitting yarn made of manmade fibers (I have forgotten which one).

The second one is green organza stitched on the cunin felt with the same yarn and some green gift wrapping band.

tif 4 – and some more tif 3

So the month of march is over. Where has the time gone? My march tif is nowhere near done, and this time I’m determined it before I start something new. I’m not that happy about this months’s challenge anyway. Up to this point, I tried to work with both the colour palette and the topic, but I honestly don’t know how to do a piece about life and its cycles in such dull colours. So I will probably pass this one.

For March tif, I have bought a nice linen fabric for the background. I’m planning to do something really big this time which may look good as a wall hanging. You will get to look at my progress as soon as I have something to show, in the mean time I have got some scraps I haven’t posted jet.

Here is one more scrap for last months tif. I stitched kunin felt with wire that was supposed to keep it flat when I heat it. Then I heatgunned it as brutally as I could. My heat gun is one of those from the hardware store, it does 300° Celsius. As you can see, it did a good job on the felt, it even altered the colours. The part that was less heaviely stitched curled up totally, the heaviely stitched part was deformed considerably.

The first picture is before heatgunning, the second one after. The pictures were scanned and prepared the same way, so they show the actual shrinkage of the piece. Of course, it is very stiff now, probably it doesn’t fit the description of Fiber any more.

Before heatgunning:

Heatgunned: