You can see that I did enjoy myself working this project by the fact that it’s been finished and off the frame for a couple of weeks already, I just never got around to posting about it! So, here’s the picture:

I’m pretty pleased with this, altthough you can see in places that I still have to work on covering the background fabric completely, it’s showing through in too many places. Now all that’s left to do with this one is to find the right frame for it. To show you how generous the embroidery kit was with the materials, here’s the threads that I’ve got left over:

To be honest, it doesn’t really look a lot less than what I started with. Now I only need another project to play with! Maybe I should take another close look at Jacobean Embroidery for inspiration?

Having taken a course in hand-quilting a while ago, I finished the course project, but let the craft slide afterwards, although I liked both the process and the result. But when I needed a portable project to take to quilt group this year, I remembered I have a couple of unused pillows in need of a cover lying around, and decided to make one up as a practice project for hand quilting. And I found out that hand quilting is definitely something that needs continuous practice:

The stitches in the middle are way bigger and more unregular than they should be, but I got back into the swing of things pretty quickly and am quite happy with the result. The motif is taken from this book, which is full of inspiration suitable for any craft you could be looking for a design for. Here’s a detail of the cover to show the quilting better:

It was a fun little project, and I already started the next hand quilting project, which will be another pillow cover, using fabric and a pattern I bought in Birmingham. But pictures of that will have to wait until I actually have something to show!

I promised I’d write a bit more about the shopping that happened while at the Festival of Quilts. Although this is a quilt festival, I did spent more  on embroidery stuff.

First and foremost I fell in love with this beauty from Needle Needs:

I wanted to have a floor stand for embroidery for a long time, and when I saw the care and engineering ingenuity that has gone into the development of this stand and the accompanying frames, I just couldn’t resist. It’s someting I expect to use for decades, so it’s an investment worth making. The Millenium Frame that goes with the stand works much like a traditional roller frame, but you don’t have to sew your fabric to the rollers, which honestly is a pain and one reason why I didn’t really like working with my roller frame before. Added advantage: I just checked that my round hand-quilting frame will also fit on the stand, so that’s a bonus. This frame is a winner, and you can see my first project already mounted. Here’s a close-up:

It’s a crewel embroidery kit from Sue Hawkins, which I also bought in Birmingham. I have always wanted to try crewel embroidery, but I don’t think you can actually get crewel wool around here, so I’d have to order online, and I wouldn’t really have known where to start anyway. This nice traditional pattern came with all the materials I needed, and it’s a joy to stitch, as you can see by my progress:

I’m enjoying myself and learning something new! The amount of crewel wool supplied with the pattern is way more than enough, so even if I made a mistake and had to throw a bit away,there’d still be plenty left to finish the design. One thing I’m absolutely amazed about is how fine the crewel wool actually is. The only wool I have any experience with is rough tapestry wool, so this was quite a surprise at first. The thread is fluffy, but really thin once it’s laid down, so I have to make my stitches denser than expected. I’m still not 100% successful, as you can see from the few spots of the background fabric peeking through here and there.

This was not all my shopping, but I’ll save the rest for another day.

Sorry for being so quiet, I’ve been busy and just returned from this year’s trip to the UK, in what seems to become an annual event for me. I’m pretty sure I’ll go next year, too, but that’s for another post.

My first stop this year was in Birmingham, for two days of fun at the Festival of Quilts. And yes, it’s big enough that you really need two days if you want to see everything at leisure. I enjoyed the exhibitions and the shopping, and we’ll get to pics of the shopping later, but what intrigued me right away was a stall that didn’t have anything to sell, just things to give away.

morsbags sociable guerilla bagging is an initiative to recycle fabric that isn’t used anymore into shopping bags and give them away to in front of supermarkets so people don’t have to get plastic bags that will just further clog up the environment. The idea is to get together with friends to make loads of bags and have fun while doing it, and then give them away. They had set a table with a few sewing machines at the festival and invited people to choose some of the recycled fabric they had there and make their own bag. So of course I had to play! Here’s the result:

The fabric is a nice heavy upholstery fabric, making a really sturdy shopping bag which I’ll definitely use. The intent of this initiative has some parallels to the Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef stuff I saw last year in London, but with a rather more practical bent to it.

Every plastic bag that isn’t needed is a good thing, but eliminating them isn’t easy at all. I’ve been trying to acquire as few of them as possible for quite a few years now, and it is difficult. There are so many shops that’ll pack your stuff into a plastic bag before you can stop them, and in some cases (say, clothing) they are practical to keep your new clothes (or wool, or yarn, or fabric) from becoming soiled while carrying them home. There are no easy solutions out there, but I still think every little bit helps, and I wouldn’t mind getting together with friends, make a few more of those bags and give them away.

Remember this?

Yes, my Maltese Shawl from Victorian Lace Today is growing, albeit slowly. I really enjoy knitting the pattern, but finding the right needles to help me with that turned out to be an adventure. The first try was using my trusty Addi Click needles. While there’s usually no problem using the interchangeable needle tips from Addi, the joins are definitely not smooth, and working with this lace-weight yarn was simply impossible, since it kept snagging at the joins all the time. So after a couple of rows I switched to a fixed Addi needle of the same size (at the top):

They’re nice, shiny, the yarn moves smoothly over the needle, but for this kind of lacework, the tips aren’t pointy enough. This pattern has lace stitches in every row, so you end up having to purl stitches together when one of the stitches is a yarn over. Trying to do that with blunt needles leads to lots of cursing and severe lack of motivation.

So, I needed another option. My LYS just got some Addi Lace needles (middle of picture) that are ostensibly designed for this kind of knitting, so I got myself one of those. The tips are nice and pointy, so the lace stitches immediately became much easier to work. But, the gold-coloured coating of those needles tarnishes really fast (there’s almost no reflection of the flash on the photo, and I haven’t knit more than maybe 10cm of the shawl with it), and when that happens, the stitches stop to slide easily on the needles. I had to work all the time to get the stitches to move to where I needed them. No wonder I started to ignore the project in favour of others.

I needed another option. I had heard the KnitPro (KnitPicks for any Americans) needles (bottom of picture) have good tips and a smooth surface, so I decided to give those a try. This is another system with exchangeable tips, but the joins are constructed differently so they’re smooth. And they’re pretty, too. You can see the tip geometry is almost identical to the Addi Lace needle. I tried them out, and yay, the fourth needle I tried for this project finally does the trick!

This was a really good lesson to remind me that using the appropriate tool for a job can make all the difference between fun and tedium. If something obviously doesn’t work, try something else! This is a good thing to keep in mind for hardware tools of all kinds as well as software. If something seems to be more difficult than it should be, check if you’re using the optimal tool for the job!

So, yesterday was the 23rd Worldwide Sketchcrawl, and our little group from last time grew again, so there were four of us this time. The weather was not really nice and way too cold for mid-July, so we decided to meet at the museum. When everybody had arrived, at least it wasn’t raining, so we went outside to do our sketching. The results are collected here. Those are my sketches:

We went down to the riverbank and everybody did a drawing of this pedestrian bridge. It’s amazing how different the perspective can be from just a few metres apart!

And this is what happens when you sit on the riverbank and don’t move a lot while sketching:

I took five pictures of this duck from about a metre away, sitting on the ground.

Just a few metres along at the riverbank there’s this beautiful Art Deco building, housing an indoor swimming pool:

And this is my version:

Lots of fun was had by all, and we’ll certainly repeat this next time.

Over at Nuts about Needlepoint, Janet has been asking people to tell the story around their first needlepoint project, so here’s mine:

This is a counted cross-stitch picture worked with a kind of thin wool. It came in a set, and I think it was the first relatively big “grown-up” project I’ve ever finished. I must have been somewhere around 13 or 14 at that time, and although I’d been doing quite a bit of needlework ever since starting school, I don’t think I finished a lot of things. I still have the embroidered needle-book I did in needlework class in 3rd grade somewhere, and the crocheted bag that was my first crochet project, also done in school. I use those, but they’re not the quality of project you can show off.

But this cross-stitch picture is different. As you can see, it’s nicely framed and behind glass, which my mom had done for me at a framing shop, and hangs in my appartment. While it’s not my usual style, there’s lots of good memories connected to it, and looking at it still brings a smile to my face.

Now, that’s nothing new around here, isn’t it? After writing that glowing review for Victorian Lace Today a few weeks ago, of course I had to try my hand at one of the patterns. I’m going to make the Maltese Shawl, after finding the appropriate yarn, of course. Thanks to the perfect service from Jürgen Weidner, I soon was in the possession of this:

Three skeins of Malabrigo Baby Merino Lace in Bergamota. The first skein is already wound using my shiny new ballwinder, which I acquired at the same time. The yarn feels really yummy, and it’s a joy to knit up, as you can see here:

I made a provisional cast-on over a spare cable of my Addi Clicks, and acquired a 4.5 mm Addi lace needle after a few rows, since I want to make my life with this as easy as possible, or I’ll never finish. The pointier tips of the lace needles are just what I need here. I have the feeling the gold-coloured finish of the lace needles is a bit less slippery than the normal Addis, but this could well be my imagination.

The picture was made after 3 pattern repeats from 88 comprising the main panel of the shawl, so I’m into this for the long haul. You can also see some big bulky metal rings in the picture. Those are my sorry excuses for stitch markers currently, since my open plastic ones were driving me to distraction with catching the yarn in all the wrong places. I’d like to have some closed rings a bit smaller, but for the moment those will do.

So, don’t expect to get updates of this venture very often, this is definitely not TV knitting, being “real” knitted lace, meaning every row is a pattern row, no dreaming while purling back across the wrong side allowed. But I think the look of the finished lace will be so worth it.

I’ve been including something handmade by me in the birthday presents I’m sending my nieces each year for quite a while now. Problem is, the crazy quilt box wasn’t going to get finished for the ninth birthday of the younger one this month. There’s just too much work left on it, and I’m missing some inspiration for the remaining seam treatments for the sides of the box. So I needed to come up with something that I would be able to finish in a week of half and hour here and 15 minutes there every day. So I remembered temari. I made my first project over a year ago for the older one’s birthday, so it only fit that the younger one would get a temari ball this year.

I used a different pattern from the same book, Temari für Einsteiger, but this time I didn’t just use the colours suggested for the project, but came up with my own combination. The green background reminds me of a spring meadow with beautiful flowers growing on it:

I’m pleased with how the colours came out. The book uses a similar gradation for the foreground colours, but has a pale blue background instead of the green one I chose. This one feels like spring, which is exactly what I wanted to achieve! I hope my niece likes it as much as I do.

There are tons of knitting books out there. Being someone who isn’t particularly interested in pattern books usually, I don’t get excited about a knitting book very often. But when I had a chance to have a look at Victorian Lace Today by Jane Sowerby at my LYS a few weeks ago, I was immediately hooked and just had to have it for myself. Thanks to the wonders of Amazon that happened pretty fast, and even at second and third look that book is just marvellous. It works on so many different levels for me, I’m sure I’ll use it as  a source of instruction as well as inspiration for a very long time.

While browsing randomly through the book at the LYS I came across an image of a page from an old knitting book that looked oddly familiar:

Reading up on that page confirmed my suspicion: It’s the only illustrated page from Miss Lambert’s My Knitting Book (link to google books). And since I’m currently working to make this one available on Project Gutenberg through Distributed Proofreaders, naturally I’d seen this page before. And I can tell you, those old knitting patterns look very strange to today’s knitters, starting with the fact that charts were not yet invented and some of the terminology was completely different from today, going all the way to not having illustrations of the finished items and the pattern descriptions being rather sparse for today’s tastes.

And this is exactly what makes Jane Sowerby’s work so amazing: She tells the story of those early pattern writers and their books, showing what they did for knitting, where patterns were usually handed down orally before. And then she goes ahead and moves those patterns into the 21st century, presenting them in a way that’s attractive to today’s knitters. The author comments extensively on the trials involved in figuring some of those things out, and the results are beautiful.

And she doesn’t stop there: At the end of the book, in addition to explaining all the different stitches used in the book and showing methods of cast-on etc. suitable for lace knitting, she goes on to explain how to use the patterns given to design your own, complete with a work sheet to help you crunch the numbers.

Faced with so much inspiration, of course I had to go and play. The requested object was a skinny shawl from one ball of yarn, to be completed within a couple of weeks so my mum could wear it to my brother’s wedding. Completely different from the elaborate lace patterns in the book, right? Yes, on first sight, but the pattern for one of the simpler center panels proved to be just the ticket, and gave me an enjoyable first experience of “real” knitted lace (meaning there’s patterning both in the right and wrong side rows).

Oh, and that’s not all of it: the book would make a great coffee table book as well. There’s lots of brillant photography not only of the knitted items but also of Victorian houses, parks and gardens. The information on where exactly all those photographs were taken is in the back of the book, so one could make a trip to Britain to see the beauty for real. Now I only need an opportunity for wearing one of those elaborate Victorian shawls, so I can make one.