Tenar’s cave

The darn thing is comunicating only in smoke signs, or at least the monitor is. I’m sorry, probably there won’t be posts before I get a new one, but hopefully that will be soon.

Tomorrow we will be sketching at Munich again, as will be many people in other towns. See here for details. If you live nearby and want to join us just drop by, we won’t be too hard to spot with all our sketching gear out. I will have a week off work now, so expect a few more meaty postings soon.

For eye candy, here is a sketch I did at the botanical garden not long ago. I confess it is the only real outdoor sketch I did since last scetchcrawl.

I’m sorry, I have to go on a blogging vacation again. My Wlan equipment is out of order and job stress/christmass stuff are keeping me too busy to fiddle with this right now. So I won’t have easy inet access until I find time to go shopping for computer stuff, which will not be for another week or two. I’m missing you all and your blogs, but sometimes real life is just more important. Sorry.

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.

So I finally did a bit more stitching. I really love pekinese stitch! Thorn stitch is just another method of couching in my book, but a very interesting one. I’ll sure use this one again. Only that braided stitch is not to my taste at all. I think it comes loose too easiely even when done correctly.

After I got this week’s tast stitch done so quickly, I decided to do some catchup, and tried the Crested Chain Stitch .

The two lines were just a learning experience, the round form was threaded in herringbone stitch manner and the threading then sewn down with small running stitches.

What can I say more? An interesting stitch, but also time-consuming to do. Again, I did it on a scrap of leftover fabric, and will probably sew it onto some bigger sampler.

I knew I would forget something. If you want to see tast 12-14 just scroll down.

Um. Ok, so this is my tastsampler for week 11, up-and-down buttonhole stitch .

During the time I started it I was struggling with a difficult decision (luckiely the whole thing sort of took care of itself by now). I tried to express my feelings a bit in this piece, so it turned out as another intentional attempt at uglieness. I’m not sure if I like it. But it did give me a lot of practice with this stitch. It is not entirely finished, but not very far from it.

The stitch itself was new to me but not unheard-of. I like many of the effects I got with it, but I also found it tendious to do and not that different from easier buttonhole variants. So while I’ll sure add it to my repertoire I’m probably not going to use it too often. I added in some chain stitch for things i couldn’ easiely achieve with this stitch.

Yes, it’s the yellow-orange-green “it’s spring and i’m uncreative” colour sheme, together with some pink to add to the saccharine sweetness, but i so felt like it. I did this in fact after the cretan stitch piece and was exhilarated that I finally get somehing done.

I was also sick of tendious work, so i did this one on coarse, loose jute scrim. I used various knitting and crochet yarns and nr. 5 and 8 pearl cotton. Of course it still took some time to do, working on coarse material has its own pitfalls. It is intended that two sides are neatly finished and the last one not. The lace at the bottom had to be added to met my size requirement because that piece of scrim was a leftover from something else. I always glue the borders of jute scrim before I start embroidering.

The stitches at the left hand border are so-called pulled-through detatched chain stitch (translation from German). You do a strait stitch, tack it down in the middle with a detached chain stitch, do the next strait stitch right next to it and tack it down with another detatched chain stitch so that the chain stitches appear connected. In the lower right corner and upper border are variations thereof. I simply did cross stitches instead of strait stiches and tacked them down with detatched chain where the half cross stitches meet.

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