Wednesday, February 8, 2012

Finished/finishing

On the knitted Navajo wrap all the threads are woven in and trimmed. (Please excuse the stray piece of pearl cotton that snuck into the picture from another project.)

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I tried to take a picture of me wearing it with the timer on my camera. Obviously, the camera was not looking at me when it took this picture, it focused on something else, but you can see the colors and the size of it. Jake is wondering why we are standing in the middle of the room, smiling, but he's willing.

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Here is a close-up showing the texture of the knitting and the edge. There are 3 rounds of crochet on the edging. It called for a conch stitch, which I think the designer made up. It gave a very cool rope-like texture, but I couldn't do it without leaving big old loops hanging off the edge, so I just made a shell border.

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I wish you could all feel this, it feels wonderful!

Last night at guild the program was a needle book, originally scheduled for February of last year. That class was canceled because of our huge snow-storm. I had forgotten I had signed up for it, so my kit was delivered to me at home, after the meeting. (I was at the meeting, but didn't pick up the kit because of, you know, forgetting.)

The items are mostly fused to the surface with Mistyfuse, although I stitched on various embellishments afterwards: 2 gold charms, 2 little angels, a little crocheted flower, a little star button, and a little tatted worm. I want to buttonhole around the outside edge. It doesn't need it to hold together, but I think it will look more finished. I still haven't added the needle pages inside; I want to label them before I stitch them in.

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This is the front.

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I like how it turned out, but I want to play some more and make another one. It was fun!

Monday, February 6, 2012

TAST week 4 & 5

I am sorry I didn't post week 4 earlier, actually I didn't stitch it until last night. It is a simple row of cretan stitch and I changed the spacing as I went along, in order to accommodate the previous stitching. I used a fine woolen thread.

I also added another example of feather stitch using silk ribbon.

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Week 5 was herringbone stitch. You cannot see it very clearly in this picture; I will take a better picture next time I have it out to show some detail. There are 6 passes in the one row of stitching. The stitches are interwoven and layered. Since this is a stitch commonly used on temari, I had a lot of ideas on what to do with it. It, also, is not as even as it could be. The stitches are crammed together. I think it would have looked nicer with a little more room between the stitches, but I am not sure the fabric would not have puckered if I had made the stitches too far apart, so this is a compromise. I used pearl cotton #8 for this stitch.

I will do the stitch this week, and then pack the sampler to take with me on vacation. I can't wait to see what is next.