Craft in May

In May, I sewed on Pax Vobiscum, and I knitted on Summit. I didn't finish either - I'm not even halfway on either. On Pax Vobiscum, I'm still on the P.

And that is about it on the crafty front.

Pax for the politicians

The Whig interpretation of history is that events unfold from an uncivilised past to the glorious present, in a smooth and fairly steady form of progress. This is especially true of the history of science, in which there are clear heroes and villans.

As we know, things are not quite so smooth: sometimes progress is lumpy and full of dead-ends, sometimes things even regress. The hero can be wrong. The theory can be discredited.

It was interesting to watch political history unfold this week. We had a crisis in Britain, the kind which will be written about in the history books. In a hundred years time, this last week will be an event to be written about in student essays, discussed in history programs and the subject of many a university thesis. If the coalition works, this week might be presented in a Whiggish manner, as the obvious stage in the evolution of British Parliamentary democracy.

I really hope it works.

In that light I offer a glimpse of the back of my Pax Vobiscum - pax vobiscum means "peace with you".



It shows the "a" and part of the "P".

FWIW, I did feel a bit sorry for Dr Brown, who, long before he became Prime Minister, was a lecturer in history. If his party had mananged a few more seats, then "Brown and Clegg" might have been the heroes of future history lessons. But I'm a lot more hopeful for the future with "Cameron and Clegg".

I'll get back to blogging when the election is over...

Wanted:

Fat lady to go to 10 Downing Street and sing

Immediate start

Hello Blog

Hello blog, do you remember me? I used to post here, about knitting and sewing and stuff.

So what have I been doing? I've been knitting Summit, but mostly when watching television. I've been sewing Pax Vobiscum, but I'm still doing the "a".

A bird built it's nest in the bush right next to our porch window, turning the porch into an observation box. We think some of the eggs have been broken, but there might be one left.

Two Green Beginnings

The start of a green oblong and also the start of the fourth column:


My sister saw my knitting: she said the colours and the pattern reminded her of moss, not realising that Moss was the name of the yarn's colourway. It is Summit, photographed next to one of the little heathers we planted over the last few days.

Two New Projects

1. Summit, from Knitty


2. hs2action
   

Radio Silence

This week has been taken up by an unexpected, non-craft project, leaving precious little time to do any sewing or knitting, and nothing to blog about. The project will continue for some time, but I expect there will be more crafting time later.

My next oblong is dark green outside, with a pink inner rectangle.

Concentric Oblongs progress

The second column (or row in the photo) of oblongs is nearly finished.

When I realised how long each colour block takes - between one and two hours - I stopped spending as long sewing on it. Even two hours is not very long, but it is significantly longer then 30 minutes each, which was my first estimate. OTOH, my first estimate for the number of oblongs was forty, and there will be only thirty.



I still love seeing the colour combinitions that my dice throws up, and it is a good study in colour values. In real life, the two greens are quite contrasting, whereas the orange and yellow blend. Similarly, by pairing a specific colour with two different colours you get a different feeling of dominance. More pictures to follow!

Origins of a design

Fired with enthusiasm, I am designing a cross-stitch picture. Yes designing it - no kit, no chart, and only an image in my mind to follow.

It started with the colours, and a discussion on a forum of decorating schemes. Browsing blogs like Attic24 and moogsmum, there is an abundunce of crisp bright colours. Although we have those colours in my house, but they don't stand out, because they are tucked away among the wooden boxes and other neutral colour ornaments we have. So my plan is to pull them all together in one place and have a bright cheerful spot. Along with a cross-stitch picture in similar colours.

So on Thursday, I went to Threads and Patches' new shop in Fenny Stratford (much bigger then their old one) and had fun choosing the colours and the fabric. I came home with seven floss colours and some white Aida. (And some other stuff. And a desire to visit their car park with a camera.)


Having chosen the colours, I needed the design. I thought I knew some of the design, so I sketched it out on squared paper and added some bits and rearranged bits and finally thought I had the arrangement right. Then I got out the Aida, and counted squares to find out how big it was going to be, and it was tiny. Because 14count Aida has 14 squares to the inch, and 5mm squared paper only has about 5 squares to the inch. Whoops.

That was Friday lunchtime.

So I thought about adding bits to the design but that would not be true to the layout I wanted. So I wengt back to my design inspiration, which was "modern quilt", and I googled and followed up the links - I'd already come across the modern quilt guild, but there were lots of others.

And one style of design stood out: the one that encapsulated my idea is in this link. The colours were wrong, but the shapes were right. So I came up with a few ideas for the blocks, and I measured them out on the Aida, and I nearly started to sew.
I wanted to randomise the layout, and came up with the idea of rolling dice to set some paramaters. But the first set of options were way too complicated, and it took thought to simplify them to fewer options.

And now it was 4pm and I hadn't done anything else all day, so I stopped to do some of that anything else.

On Saturday morning I was at last ready to sew. But maybe I ought to check I was on the right lines, and I tacked (With sewing cotton) a few lines to ensure the layout was right.

But it wasn't. So I thought some more, and retacked the lines, and finally I was happy with the layout.

After lunch I made the first stitches, at last. But although I'd worked out I might even be able to do two blocks an hour, by the end of the afternoon, I had one block done, and I still hadn't been doing anything much else.

On Sunday, I started sewing again, and I seemed to spend most of the day sewing, so I should have made lots of progress.

Ho hum. I calculated I had done 275 stitches in the entire day. I've since worked out that a row of 11 stitches in a single colour takes over five minutes, so of course it is taking me longer then I expected.

But there is another reason - which I will reveal later, and I'm very pleased with at the moment.

Needlework not Knitting

My knitting mojo must be somewhere, but it certainly isn't anywhere near me. For the last two weeks or so, I've only knitted at the knitting group. I tried picking up my current project today, but 20 minutes later, it was put down again.

What I have been doing is lots of sewing. Or to be precise, embroidery. All from other people's designs, in the form of kits. And the problem with that - from a blogging POV - is that the photos are not the most scintillating of blog candy.

Just look at these photos:
All of last year

28th January

21st February

24th February

If it was four photos of knitting or quilting or dressmaking, I could display them differntly: draped or folded, neatly piled or strewn. But embroidary is basically flat, the size if the piece is the same (even if the area covered by stitches changes). Even changing the backgound doesn't actually make a great deal of difference to the photo.

I am enjoying it, and I'm enjoying the needlework blogs I've been exploring. But my photos are a bit dull.

Celtic Knot or Not

If one uses the dining room table for one's sewing machine, the machine has to be put away at frequent intervals. And then sometimes when it is put away, the machine stays put away for days... and weeks ... and months.

Which explains why nothing happened to my Celtic Knot (from Ferret's book) between about September (when I last posted about it) and a week ago. But the sewing machine stayed put away, and I got sidetracked with other things.

Then one of the kids needed the machine, so it got dragged out and crucially, not put away afterwards.

The following morning, the day before half term, it called to me, it's siren call keeping me from all the other possibilities. It was impossible to resist, especially knowing it was my last chance for over a week. I threaded the red thread into place, smoothed out my quilt sandwich and started to sew.

(I should make it clear that I am a novice at machine quilting, so what happened next is entirely my fault. And it was full of pins.)

I sewed a few inches of bias tape in place, and from the top it looked fine.
But because I was stopping and starting lots anyway, I used one of the stops to check the back. The back was not fine, the back had lots of skipped stitches.



I cut the thread, and started again in a different place. Soon I checked the back again, and there were still lots of skipped threads. So I rethreaded the machine, and started for a third time - and there were still lots of skipped threads.

Normally, I would stop at this point and do something else.

But I thought back to last summer, and helping Ferret at the Festival of Quilts, an event I still haven't properly blogged.

People visiting the gallery tended to open the conversation with one of several 'standard' comments (although the ways it would diverge after a standard response were endlessly fascinating). One standard conversation started with the visitor saying "it looks so difficult, I don't think I could do that" (or something similar). My answer was a variation on "what Ferret says is that if you start with the bit you can do, your skills will increase and then you'll be able to do things you can't do now."

"Hmmm", I thought to myself, "if I was saying that, then I'd better actually put it into practise".

So I had a cup of coffee and a biscuit, and started again. This time, I just continued, all the way round the knot, slowly and carefully, making sure that what I could see looked fine. It took about 45 minutes to go all the way round, but finally it was done. And I took it out of the machine and looked at the back. And I realised what the problem had been, because there were areas where there was no skipping. The skipping problem happened in the areas with lots of pins! The last bits of sewing were problem free because I had been taking the pins out as I sewed.

I finished off by sewing the other side of the bias tape in place, and declared it done (for the moment). I am actually very pleased with the result: the bias tape does not show up much, because it was cut from the same material as the background, but that was the effect I wanted. The red stitching shows up well on the blue backing material (although not in the photos) and again that was the effect I wanted. It isn't good enough for a reversable wallhanging, but I am pleased with it as a practise piece.

Oh yeah, what is it meant to be? It's the convection currents inside a star, and the blue is the night sky. I might use yellow instead of red for my next try, but it's sort of what I wanted.