London calling

We're off on our travels once again! This time it's England and Scotland. I will do my best to keep up with blogging. But some of the smaller villages may not have internet except in cafes.

We arrive Monday morning and will take advantage of a full day with a trip to the British Museum and Library! So I'll try and post as soon as I can.

Tah tah.

(please tell me someone got the musical reference in my blog title this morning?)

Crewel Embroidery

One of my newer hobbies is Crewel Embroidery. According to our friend Wikipedia:

Crewel Embroidery, or Crewelwork, is a decorative form of surface embroidery using wool and a variety of different embroidery stitches to follow a design outline applied to the fabric. The technique is at least a thousand years old. It was used in the Bayeux Tapestry, in Jacobean embroidery and in the Quaker tapestry. The origin of the word crewel is unknown but is thought to come from an ancient word describing the curl in the staple, the single hair of the wool.

I stumbled upon a lovely lady who recreates historic English designs into kits for purchase. So my beginner kit was an Elizabethan pansy pattern. I think it turned out rather nice.

Here's a more zoomed in photo, you can see the technique called soft shading that gives it a painterly affect.

Quick Updates

So for those of you who missed it, I graduated. I didn't want a big fuss made, I didn't even do the ceremony. But it was a nice surprise to come home and find that David had bought me flowers. Two of my favorite kinds.

He has his moments...choosing here to take the photo, not one of them.

And a quick update on the birds since we had to water our plant today.

Look at the baby!

Project for me!

Most of the time I give my craft items away. But I'm keeping this one. I made it in a deep burgundy (it looks more plain red in the pics) so that 1. it goes with my stuff and 2. it won't show as quickly if (when) I spill. Cool huh? Square doily. Who knew.

Maybe this will liven up our old table a bit.

Nice little detail shot, I don't know what he did that it came out so bright red though.

Look what we found!

Lately I have been enjoying the beautiful song of a little male house finch who sits on my bird feeder and just sings his little heart out. One day I told David he must be singing for a lady friend. Sure enough, we were sitting by the sliding glass door and heard a chirp from my hanging plant. Then David went to water it and....

found this.

Fancy Paaants (this must be said in a sing-song voice)

Look who's getting fancy now....Actually I needed special embroidery scissors. Believe it not but my regular scissors for my yarn work can't quick snip my thread. Go figure. And I have special tipped Fiskar ones for my tatting but I need to keep those sharp for tatting. (honestly, there is method behind the madness) So if I had to buy new scissors why not get some cute ones? Plus the 40% coupon from Michaels added to the incentive.

Cool huh? They are stork scissors.

New Doily

So I seldom make doilies because...well because I don't have anywhere nice to really put them. But I couldn't resist giving thread crochet another try. I picked up a book of Pineapple Doilies. I guess I can see the "pineapple" shape? I thought they were pretty anyways. Here are some pictures of my finished product called Pineapple Blossom.

All finished, it measures approximately 12 inches in diameter.

Here's a nice detail of the center.