Concert

Friday two weeks ago, the night Paris happened, i was on a concert. Vredehammer, Vreid and Keep of Kalessin. Sadly, they had to play in front of less than 50 people, probably because Mötley Crüe were in town the same night.

But boy, was this a concert! Vredehammer, the opener, blew me away. The drummer was sorta out of sync for the first two songs, but then he found his rhythm and everything went great. They do melodic black metal, if this is a style. They were IMHO the best band of the evening and a real discovery. Like with many black metal bands, their stage acting was rather sparse, but they did interact. I loved their complex rhythms and melodic elements.

Here are two pics of Per Valla, their singer and guitar player. Like ever so often, I spent more time headbanging and enjoying the concert than trying to get good pics. Also, that was difficult despite the small venue because of the stage fog.

Next were Vreid. Nice enough, techically perfect and just agressive enough, but for me, somehow lacking. I think their songs sound too much the same.

Then, along came Keep of Kalessin. They do a mix of death and black metal with melodic and progressive elements. Life they were even more agressive and in your face than on CD. They interacted with the audience a lot and everybody went crazy, and so did I. They acted as enrgetically and professionally as if they were playing in front of thousands, and after the concert, they shook everyone’s hands and thanked us for the party. Thank you guys, you were great!

The pics show Singer Thebon, too bad my pics of other band members didn’t work. Darn stage fog!

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Sobek

I spontaneously started stitching this after the plane crash at Egypt. It is not yet done, and is supposed to be accompanied by some plea to Sobek, Egypts most ancient god of fertility and protection. I have not yet decided on the final text. I know, probably not nice, and not a good idea, but sometimes my thoughts need a way out.

Now, after Paris, I seem to have no more stitches.

The things some right wing politicians and their followers say in public make me just as sad and furious. This won’t help.

The fact that most of the perpetrators grew up in Europe, and became what they are right next door, desperate about our own latent (or not so latent) xenophobia, makes it so much worse.

Cross Stitch Mini Sampler

Sorry for my long absence, I was so busy at my day job. For almost mindless stitching, I added a cross stitch section to one of my sampler bands.
The cross stitch alphabets came from an old DMC publication, which you can download here.
The rest of the design just happened, the back stitch letters are my own.
SK are my real life initials. The saying, two lines of a song by The Tremeloes was, at that moment, about all the things you experience when working with people.

The piece was stitched on an almost evenweave dress linen, about 26 threads/13 crosses per inch using 2 strands of Anchor floss for the cross stitches and #12 pearl cotton by DMC for the back stitching.

By the way, I think it is funny how much you read about cross stitch in embroidery blogs recently. Are these the beginnings of a trend or something?

Stitch Sunday – Break, in Order to Do it Better

Well, during the last weeks, I felt my Stitch Sunday post are becoming uninspiring. I still have enough ideas, the chain stitch family I’ve been at is almost inexhaustible, but I feel I need to order my thoughts and write a more useful program. So I’ll take my time to do this, and then resume stitch Sunday posts.
Well, at least I have done some leisure stitching that helped me relax after work, so you’ll get to see some eye candy soon.

Stitch Sunday 11 – Roman Stitch (or just Stacked Fly Stitch)

Jet another Sunday. I know I have been lazy about posting these days, I have a helluva time at work, everyone except me seems to be on vacation, and there is a big construction site on the railway I have to take to work, causing a lot of annoyances. Also, I am in the process of switching to a new laptop.

So today’s stitch is usually called roman stitch, it is used both in conventional surface embroidery and in needlepoint on canvas. However, it is really just stacked fly stitches. it is usually worked by doing the loop first and then tacking it down, because the tacking stitch needs to be as small as possible. Some books classify roman stitch as a kind of couching, but I think it is so done like fly stitch, and true couching should require more than one tacking stitch in most places to hold down one thread. However, this stitch is a good example for how there is a limited number of ways to construct stitches, but endless possibilities for variation and specialized usage.

Here I show how to use this stitch to do a conventional leaf.  It is supposed to be a rose leaf, and those are serrated. So I make stitches of differing length to hint at this. For non-serrated leaves, you can stitch a back stitch outline first to make sure you get it right.

First, do a very close fly stitch at the top of the leaf, almost a detatched chain stitch.

Do the next fly stitch putting the loop next to the loop part of the first, come up for the tacking stitch where the last tacking stitch ended. Make the new tacking stitch straight and small. Remember the tacking stitches will form the midline of the leaf.

Add more fly stitches in the same way.

Continue until the leaf (or part of a leaf) is finished. Sometimes you will need to add a few straight stitches at the bottom to get the right shape.

Back Home

I am back home, trying to adjust to normal life again. I have been at summer breeze, a metal festival for roughly 35000 people, tuesday to sunday 🙂 and enjoyed it so much. For me this is the best way to just stop worrying and have some serious fun. I’m still so happy, and busy telling my intestines they are supposed to consume real food, not canned ravioli, beer and energy drinks. You will read more about the festival in due course, but may be not right here. I have another week off work, and I will do some stitching and take a few pics more appropriate for this blog 😉

Blogging? And a Challenge

So obviously, I am blogging again, and I do have the intention to keep it up longer than last year. Yes, this is one of those dreaded “why do I blog?” postings ;-). I do this for me, because it helps to motivate me to do creative stuff, and gives me sort of deadlines for my crafting. I need to have stuff to blog about, after all.

I know it is sort of cheesy to use that sort of motivation, and the I don’t want to stoop so low to do stuff just to blog about. But sometimes, I just need a bit of external motivation. I like to tell myself that I do a good thing along the way because my postings may provide entertainment or even inspiration for others. Like ever during the last years, I have been battling health issues and stress at my day job the last months, and sometimes I forget how good it would do me to create something instead of just sleeping or watching TV through most of my free time.

The thing that inspired me most to stitch during the last years was Sharon Bogon’s TAST challenge, which is on a long break at this point. I have done more for it than I posted during the last year, and I miss it. I have a few stitch tutorials in the pipeline anyway, so I’ll do my own challenge, again, both for you and for me. Of couse, it will not be on tuesdays, I respect Sharon too much for that. It will be stitch sunday. I may post a detailed challenge proposal tomorrow and the first installment next sunday. Basically, I will post a stitch description each sunday and everyone who wants to go along with it can do a blog post about the stitch and comment on my posting to let people know where to find it. What do you think, will there be participants?

Well, I guess it doesn’t matter anyway. I have resumed work on my samplers and other stitching, and writing about it in a somewhat structured way will be no loss of time. It definitely will help me to keep at it.

OK, enough navel gazing for today. And to make sure even this post doesn’t come without eye candy, here is a pice of fabric paper I did last weekend. I haven’t messed with acrylics for too long, it was such fun. it was made from cheap 100% cotton fabric, commercial flower paper, dried moss and turquoise silk chiffon as top layer.