Where have I been?

It has been about 6 months – no, 7 months – since I’ve done any needlework. What happened?  Well, first it was summer, and I’m outside as much as possible – sometimes working in the garden, sometimes just lying in a hammock – and I generally don’t do a lot of stitching in the summer.  Then in the fall, I was obsessed by the election.  Work has been quite busy, and I can come up with any number of other excuses.  Basically, I was unmotivated. I’ve had piles of stuff sitting on my worktable for months.

Sharon B’s started a new activity - Stitch Explorer 2009 – to explore different styles of needlework. I’m joining in late.  The first style is chicken scratch.  This isn’t a style I’ve tried before, but the individual elements – cross stitch, running stitch, lacing – are all familiar.

Here’s my first example.

Chicken scratch is generally done on gingham or other checked fabric, which I don’t particularly like (nor do I have any readily available), so instead I counted threads to set up a grid.

I called this blog “Snow Days” because I started it in the winter, when snow, and more snow, was all I could think about.  But winter is when I stitch, or needlepoint, or embroider, much more so than summer.  Once spring comes, I really don’t feel like sitting and focusing on needlework.  I want to be outside, in the garden, planting or weeding, or simply admiring. (Admiring quickly turns back to weeding.)  I want to be outside walking or bicycling, not indoors.  Yes, I worked on small projects on the porch, but I generally don’t keep at it for very long.  It is not so enjoyable to work on a tablecloth with yards of material piled on your lap in 90 degree weather.

SharonB’s question for the May Take it Further Challenge is “what do you call yourself and why?”

If I am honest, I have to call myself a procrastinator.

May is more than halfway through, and I haven’t even started this month’s challenge. But I’ll get around to it – really!

I love the color scheme for this month, though -

Very spring-like, for those of us in the northern hemisphere, and much more to my taste than last month’s darker brown palette.

I’m a little late, but I’ve gotten to the April TIF – the question about change.

I don’t particular like change. I generally think of changes to the worse, not to the better.  Intellectually, I know that isn’t true, but emotionally – that’s a different issue.  When I read the Sharon B’s challenge for April, I immediately thought of black, gloomy things with lots of torn threads, or maybe mud-colored stitching of a bottomless pit (although it does raise the interesting question of how best to portray a bottomless pit in needlepoint. Which stitches to use?), or perhaps a piece of linen with scorch marks.

But maybe this had something to do with the winter. When in 3 weeks, things can change from snow and ice and misery, to

then suddenly things don’t seem quite so bad.

It has been a terrific month for daffodils here. Many years we get a final frost and they get killed off too soon, but this year the weather has cooperated (although still another two weeks to the last frost date, when it is safe for planting). This year, the flowers have been bright and showy and exuberant.  I wanted to stitch  something related to the flowers, and something with a lot of bright, bright yellow.

I took an image of a daffodil and enlarged a small portion of it, and started stitching.

I wanted to see what I could do with just one color, to feel like spring.

I’m not satisfied with the result. The piece is about 2 inches square, and includes chain stitch, detatched chain, stem, satin, couching, back stitch, buttonhole, and rice stitch, and leaf stitch (a poor choice). A little more planning would have helped, a lot.  But spring is here, and it is suddenly too beautiful to sit inside stitching.

I’m not sure I’m going to do a piece for the April TIF challenge – time is a little tight these days. I think I’m going to try to finish a cutwork tablecloth that has been hanging around for years – at least 7 or 8 years, I think.

As a first step, I carefully washed and ironed the tablecloth. It is about 4 feet square.  Here’s what it looks like:

There were a few spots on it (e.g. I had left a needle in the cloth, and there’s a mark.  Shame on me.) 

For some reason – I can’t remember why – the only part I hadn’t cut yet is the little bit at the bottom left corner:

yes, just that little bit that looks like a tail on the corner – maybe 4 inches worth.

In addition to finish trimming the fabric, I want to go over the entire tablecloth to check for worn threads, or for sections that could use a bit of repair.

I’ve been reading “The art of embroidery” by Francoise Tellier-Loumagne. This is a beautifully illustrated (500 color photos) and very imaginative and inspiring book. It isn’t a comprehensive review of embroider, or a stitch dictionary – more like an overview of creative embroidery and the directions in which it can lead.

What I found particularly interesting was how she started with an element – for example, a photo of flower, a plant, or a rock – and interpreted it in different ways using different stitches or techniques. Same starting points, but leading to very different results.

As an example (a bit hard to see), the cover illustration shows how a different stitches (fly stitch, cross stitch, split stitch, beading, etc.) can be used to create varieties of leaves.

I did a bit of searching and found her website.

Sharon B’s Take It Further challenge for April is “How do you see change?” I’m having a terrible time trying to come up with ideas for this.

There are various levels of change. There is change on the broader, public scale – global change, political change, technological change. There are changes in fashion (not that that would be my strong point). Then there’s change on the personal level – changes in job, in family, in where you live, in lifestyle.

At a loss, I looked up “change” in the thesaurus.  I found “change” as in money – pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, and in Canada, loonies and toonies.

There are synonyms for change – in the sense of  “alteration”, there is: about-face, addition, adjustment, advance, break, compression, contraction, conversion, correction, development, difference, distortion, diversification, diversity, enlargement, innovation, metamorphosis, modification, modulation, mutation, novelty, permutation, reconstruction, refinement, remodeling, reversal, revision, revolution, shift, surrogate, switch, tempering, transformation, transition, transmutation, turn, turnover, variance, variation, variety, vicissitude

“Innovation” has a positive connotation; correction a negative one (as in a “correction” in the financial system).

I’m probably obsessing about this.

There are the cute linguistic quirks of English – change one’s underwear, change ringing, change a tune, sea change, short change, small change, change for dinner, change your mind.  None of this is getting any stitching done, but it is an amusing off-shoot.

In general, I’m not a fan of change. At first, reading Sharon’s challenge, my image of change was a deep black box, with something unknown at the bottom. Black on black on black – not a very positive image (although a stitching challenge….).  but as I explore “change,” I’m just starting to see other options.

I’m trying to decide what my next project should be. I’m still planning to continue with the monthly Take It Further challenge, but I also want to get back to some longer-term projects.

The debate is whether I finish up some of the old projects, or start something new – and if something new, what?

How do other people decide what to focus on? Time is a limited commodity – there’s only so much available for me to spend with needlework. I know that if I start doing something I don’t like, it will not get done. If I start a book that I don’t like, I can stop reading and give the book away, or return it to the library, but if I start a needlework project that I don’t like, I’m then left with a pile of thread and materials which reproach me every time I notice it.

I guess one question is how to decide how much of a commitment to make to a project. The Dorset buttons I was playing with earlier in the month – those take perhaps an hour, at most. A needlepoint pillow takes a couple of months for me.

The other issue is that there are so many things to try. I have great fun checking other blogs and seeing new ideas, new techniques to try.

Right now, there are two old projects I’d like to finish. One is a cutwork tablecloth, started perhaps 10 (or 15) years ago. This is about 48″ square.

If I focused on it for a month, I could probably finish it. It needs threads trimmed, mistakes fixed, etc. Probably the first thing I need to do is air it out to make sure no mildew has gotten into it.

The other item is to finish a needlework canvas that I had been working for a piano bench. The dragon is largely done, and what is left is the background. Either I’m in for a couple of months of basketweave, or I need to come up with something a bit more interesting to do for the background. Since it is intended for a bench, the background needs to wear well – no openwork here.  And did I mention that I don’t currently have a piano bench to fit this canvas?

I may have gotten the canvas originally at Tapisseries de la Bucherie in Paris, but it has been so long that I’m not positive about that.  It would have been  at least 10 years ago, back  when the US$ was worth a lot more. 

Do you remember the scene in The Wizard of Oz where the old house has been tossed and turned by the cyclone and dropped out of the sky, and Dorothy is standing in the dingy, black and white and grey weatherbeaten, worn-out house, and she opens the door and there is Oz, in gorgeous Technicolor?

That is spring.

At least, that is what spring can feel like.

Don’t mistake me – spring hasn’t made it to Ontario yet. We still have snowbanks along the driveway, and our composter is frozen solid, and there is snow in the forecast again for the next few days.

But in a few weeks, it will be here.

That is what I was thinking of in doing this TIF piece for March. As I wrote in an earlier post, one of the first signs of spring is when the winter aconite shows up. These are very tiny, bright yellow flowers, which suddenly pop out and are very vivid against the background of dead grass and last year’s leaves.

Here’s my piece:

I printed a b&w photo of dead leaves using the instructions I found here. I then added some flowers – some buds, some in full bloom – using french knots, oyster stitch, chain stitch, and fly stitch. The flowers don’t particularly look like winter aconite, but they do capture that bright, intense yellow that jumps out through the dirty brown, drab late winter landscape.

If I were spending more time working on this I would add some texture to the leaves – possibly running stitch and outline stitches, to emphasize the layers of leaves. But as this was an experiment for me (and I probably won’t get to do much more before the end of the month), I’m happy the way it is.

This was the first time I’d tried printing on fabric, and I was surprised at how easy it was. I ironed the fabric with freezer paper, ran it through the laser printer, and then let it sit for an hour or so before peeling off the paper.

One question – the instructions I used didn’t specify how to fix the image. I’m not sure if that is the correct term – maybe I mean stabilize? What I mean is, how do I keep the image from smearing or wearing off, or is that an inevitable problem with laser printers, as opposed to inkjet? Can someone advise me what to do?

Last night I went on my annual hamentashen spree.  Hamentashen are a cookie traditionally made for the Jewish holiday of Purim.

I used the orange-and-oil dough recipe from Marcy Goldman’s “A Treasury of Jewish Holiday Baking,” to keep them parve, and her dried sour cherry and cranberry filling. (No poppy seeds here!) If that wasn’t non-traditional enough, a few I filled with Rootham’s apple peach cinnamon jam, and a few with Nutella.

By the way, should this be spelled “hamentashen” or “hamentaschen” (with the extra “c”) or some other way?  I googled both this afternoon.

Hamentashen -  28,200 hits

Hamentaschen – 16, 500 hits 

Hamantaschen – 47,500 hits

Hamantashen – 22,900 hits

Who knew?