Another Absence

Hi!  The weather has been so depressing here lately that I haven't been motivated to do much other than cook and sew and crochet.  This is why last week's Links of the Week have come out today (and have last week's date on them).

I have finished my friend's birthday present scarf, and have to finish edging it, then block it, then send it.  The copies of my thesis that I had bound weeks ago are still sitting on the floor behind the couch waiting to be sent.  My gnome picture that was the stitch along at Feeling Stitchy LAST month, is still going (I even finished a whole flower yesterday), but I have realised that the beads we got at Spotlight last week are too big to use for everywhere I wanted to put a bead, so when Mum goes to the hospital for x rays (her doctor thinks she might have arthritis!) on Monday, I will tag along and pop into Spotlight again for some smaller beads.

I made a recipe from World of Cake that, if I had followed the instructions properly would never have worked (please people, check your quantities before recipe books go to the printer!) because it listed 1c of flour for about 3 or more cups of liquid, and assumed a bread-like dough would result.  Three extra cups of flour were, luckily, in the cupboard.  I made another recipe from that book and it turned out fabulously, so I stand by my claim that the book rocks.  I made this (delicious!), and also these (best chocolate chip/chunk biscuits ever!).

And today I am listening to hours of podcasts, broken up by listening to Bjork.  I will try to be better about posting more regularly again.  I was doing so well, too!  What are you up to?  Is anyone reading this enjoying the freezing weather here in NZ?  I'm sure we could amuse ourselves by asking everyone we talk to how many layers they're wearing (thermal singlet, t shirt, two jumpers, two pairs of pants, socks, thermal socks,...  does a wheat bag count as a layer?)!

Things

I've just realised I've not posted anything since last week!  What have I been up to?  I made brioches, I started yet another canvas (this time it's actually for me!), found out a friend got engaged :-), found out I didn't get the library job I was interviewed for :-(, picked up the copies of my thesis from the bindery (see the photo below), went bowling for the first time in two years (and my score really showed it!), continued working on another crocheted scarf (a bright red one for a birthday present), emptied everything other than furniture out of my room in an attempt to eliminate all traces of dust, then cleaned the walls, and have started to put everything back in.  So not all that much really.

 

Oh, I also started writing a book review, which I haven't finished, and decided not to finish China Mieville's The City and The City (mostly because I don't like his writing style - the story on the other hand, was pretty ingenious).  Instead I'm reading Jules Verne's Journey to the Centre of the Earth.  The last Verne I read was 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, otherwise known as The Fish Directory due to its almost complete lack of plot and frequent ichthyological infodumps.  But hey, who can dislike a book where a giant cuttlefish tries to kill you?

This week, I am going to finish the new canvas, birthday crochet scarf, and mission bedroom-tidy-up.  And I think I will request Supernatural season two from the library.  And seeing as it's fine, I might just go for a walk.

Africa - Another Canvas

Now that my friend has received her birthday/going-away present and has gone-away, I'm going to share with you the canvas I made for her (thanks to her for the first picture, that I stole from Facebook without asking :-).  It's another long post people, so if you're not interested in step-by-step pretties, just admire the first photo.

This one is a bit bigger than the one I made for Mum's birthday a few months ago, but it ended up taking about the same amount of time to stitch.  The time drain was in the painting.  In Mum's canvas there was little to paint other than a background of pretty colours and some leaves.  This time, I was ambitious - I painted a sunset scene of an African plain with Mt Kilimanjaro in the background.  I don't claim to be a great painter, which is why I use photos to trace an outline onto the canvas, and also use fabric and embroidery to make it more special.

In this picture you can see that I painted the map of Africa, despite the fact that it would eventually be covered with fabric.  When I made Mum's canvas, I found that I had to make a set of butterfly wings bigger to cover the space that I hadn't painted, and although it looks fine, it's something I wish I hadn't had to do (for one thing it was another thing to do when I was rushing to get it finished, and for another it meant a waste of material as I had to throw away the first set of wings that didn't fit).

I also wanted to make sure that no white showed through the material I used, and thought the green was a natural choice.  In the end, I could see little places around the edge of the material where the sky colours had gone over the lines, so I was glad I'd painted the rest green (though I doubt anyone else would notice).

Then I found a nice font online, typed, printed, and pinned AFRICA to some bright red felt, and sewed it on.  You may be able to see just how bright the red is in the FRICA, but how the thread colours used to stitch it on have toned it down.

Then I transferred (using the same technique I talked about for Mum's canvas) a map of Africa with all of its borders onto some awesome material I found at Spotlight, but before I cut it out, I realised it was going to fray horribly.  I have no idea where I heard it, but I remembered hearing that spraying fabric with hairspray can stop this.  It worked!  Although it didn't stop the fraying completely, it did stop the material from fraying just by being brushed as I sewed it.

It did, however, change the colour of the fabric slightly (something I didn't mind, but just keep it in mind if you try it).

I sewed the outline and French knot islands (that you can't see in this picture unless you know they're there) in a variagated yellow-brown-yellow thread, the internal borders in different shades of green, and the lakes that form some of the borders in a vibrant blue.  The lettering at the top was in green and beige.

Next I sewed on the silhouettes of the animals.  This is the part of the project I like the least in the finished article.  I find the animals, simply cut out of black felt from a picture found online, looked a little as though they're simply floating in the foreground.

If I had had the time or realised earlier, I may have been able to do something to fix it, but I'm not sure how.  I managed to darken the paint a little below them in hopes of giving them ground to walk on, but I think perhaps I needed something 3D to make it really look right.  But my friend likes them, so I'm happy.

The last thing I did was cover the back.  From doing Mum's canvas, I figured out that covering the back with black felt (the cheaper stuff, not the same as I used for the animals) would stop light showing through the needle holes in the canvas caused when stitching.  These holes don't show through with regular material, but because canvas is quite rigid, it doesn't readjust itself around the thread.

You're basically poking tiny holes in it and if the thread doesn't quite fill the holes, some light shows through.  I glued the edges of that down so it wouldn't shift over time, and then tacked another piece of awesome fabric to the back frame to cover everything, and to hold the ribbon hanger.

As I've said before, I am quite fond of (what I will call) my invention (until I find someone who invented it first!), because it combines some things that I'm not all that great at but really enjoy - painting (which I doubt I'll ever be good at), and embroidery (which I'm going to start working on) - and creates a whole lot of colour and impact in a relatively short amount of time.

So, if you ever see pictures that you think might look cool done in this way, let me know!  Line drawings are best, but since using the photo for Mt Kilimanjaro, I realise one needn't be limited to them.  If you would like one, I'm sure I can make one for you, but I don't think I can send them overseas as the canvas frames are wood.

Next Project

You may recall my mentioning (well, I believe I mentioned it...) that I was working on a gift for a friend who was leaving (and has now left) for Africa for four months and would be celebrating her 30th birthday over there.  Well, Thursday night was her going-away/birthday dinner (which was fabulous by the way, but I'll come back to that) and I had aimed to finish the project by then, however, as is usual for me, I was overly ambitious, and had to text her on Wednesday to ask for an extra day.  So I finished yesterday.  This is why I haven't been around much (now I know I have mentioned this project, in the same breath as 'sorry for not posting!'), and I will post about that tomorrow.

But for now, I thought I would post about my next project.  I know I shouldn't be taking on yet another project when I still have my scarf to finish (ie sew in the ends), Mum's scarf to finish (that I haven't mentioned yet, but will post about shortly), a canvas for myself (finally), and one that Mum's going to attempt to sew (that I will doubtless have to help her with - read 'help' more as 'force to work on and not put off' [do as I say not as I do]).  However, I have cold hands.  So I am looking around on the internet for a free crochet pattern for fingerless gloves.  Gloves with fingers don't allow for ease of typing/sewing/etc, and mittens freak me out (don't ask), so fingerless gloves are the way to go.  And, as we all know, I can't finish a knitting project to save my life.

To make a short story long, I just can't seem to find any patterns for what I want.  There are so many lovely fingerless mittens/mittens/glove patterns in crochet out there, but until I found these it looked like I was out of luck.  I don't like the button or the gap on top of the hand (that is, the dorsal aspect), but I'm hoping to combine it with this pattern (or something like it) to get the hand and lower arm right.

I blame the fact that I'm still tired, or re-tired, from the sewing, and the fact that I've been listening to story podcasts end-to-end all week while I've been sewing, for my being overly verbose about a very simple semi-complaint that has no pictures...  Perhaps this should mark bed time?

To make up for it, here's a cute, be it very grainy, picture of Kashka, demon Russian (but not really) kitten (cat):

Mum's Birthday - Part Three: The Present

This is (finally) the last installment of the Mum's Birthday series (lol).  My mum loves butterflies, so much so that her bedroom is becoming festooned with butterfly pretties.  I thought I would add to that, but didn't know how to make something very special.  I had been collecting butterfly pictures from the Graphics Fairy, and finally settled on this one:

Pretty right?  But not exactly colourful.  So not something to simply print out and frame.  In a flash of inspiration I can only credit to the muses smiling on me (I haven't ever seen anyone do this before), I decided to buy a small painter's canvas, paint it, stencil the image onto it, then embroider it.  I didn't even know if it was possible to embroider painter's canvas when I bought it, but I never let silly things like impossibility stop me when I think I have a great idea for a surprise.  So, while the ladies fingers baked, I printed the image, used a lead pencil to colour in the back of the image then trace it onto the canvas (a technique for transferring images for embroidering that I learned here but altered to use a lead pencil), then painted the background:

I left the butterflies unpainted because I planned to applique some pretty fabric scraps, and didn't want the paint showing through them.  Next time I will paint further over the boarders of elements that will be appliqued, so that placing the fabric cut-outs need not be so exact.  I found I couldn't see the pencil marks well enough, and so traced it on again (using two reference points and pins to get it in the same place), as you can see in the picture.

Next I embroidered the thistles.  Because they were already painted, I needed only back stitch as if around a patch of satin stitch - the outline, thorns, thistle flowers.  I added a few French knots to be emerging thistle flowers.

The most difficult part of this process was putting my signature on the bottom.  I forgot about the wooden frame and signed in pencil just a little too low and had to pass the needle through at a terrible angle to avoid blunting it on the wood.  The picture may not show the detail very well, but you get the idea of how the embroidery creates a three dimensional effect.

Lastly, I tackled the butterflies.  First, I tried to simply pin the fabric onto the canvas, but it moved too much.  In the end I tacked the wings and body pieces onto the canvas with dressmaker's thread.

That's a piece of fake leather (the surface splits like anything!) and some shiny fabric left over from an old ball dress.  The white butterfly's wings are scraps from a project Mum did years ago.  After sewing the body with dark brown thread, I sewed around the edge of the wings with satin thread, added French knot eyes, and feelers.  I then made a design for the wings and used the same technique as above to transfer them onto the fabric.

This is (a terrible photo of) the finished product.  Although the photo is a bit blurry, I think you can see what I mean about the three dimensionality the embroidery thread created on top of the painting, and how it is emphasised by the material placed on top.  Anyone with keen eyes may notice that it turned out a little different to the original, with the most obvious example being the designs on the wings.  But I altered it to suit the medium and the colours (too much of that pretty salmony colour would have been ugly), and because I think my wing designs are prettier!

What do you think of it?  I haven't seen anyone else do exactly this before, though it is a fabulous way of creating a beautiful (if I do say so myself!) and very colourful image that is inexpensive (the canvas was from a $3 shop, the fabric was scraps, and most of the embroidery thread was from Mum's collection), and doesn't need framing.  Time will tell how dusty/faded it will get.  Mum loved it and is now inspired to do her own (which, with her permission, I will post on here once it's done).  I'm so happy with how it turned out that I am making one for myself too, and I think I have figured out what mine will be, but will wait until it's finished to announce it!