handstories

Week in Review ***

(*** Friends of ours eat all of their leftovers on the weekends, they call it "Week in Review".)

"Circles Held Her"

    Unexpectedly, the houses are still coming.  I want to learn some photo collage skills, to create a village of these stories of home for myself.

    The evening birds seem much more contented than the morning ones.  More songlike, rather than desperate "Let's get going!" tweets.  Remembering the mornings of hungry little ones and the rush to get everyone everything and out the door on time.

    LOTS of Jude's thread beads happening.

    Sometimes I end up feeling dotty from them.  Deb's thread and cloth must have had the same dye recipe, and Tina's yellow framing cloth is the icing on the cake.

    I've been listening to books from the library while I stitch these days.  Finished a lovely middle reader Caribbean fairy-sea-tale yesterday, A Comb of Wishes, and am now partway into Cloud Cuckoo Land.  What a change in required concentration level!

    A boat stitched while thinking of dearest friend who is out at sea for the next couple of weeks.  She leads a life of adventure with new experiences and people at every turn- a glittering existence.  In my quiet lamp lit corner, I sometimes wonder how we found and held onto each other over the last twenty plus years?

    Walking through Seattle in springtime, it's hard to remember to watch where you're going.  I'm often tripping over the sidewalk cracks or getting dizzy from craning my neck to the sky and tree tops.

    On Earth Day, someone on Instagram posted their visit to Walden's Pond.  I was there 24 years ago last January with K., visiting my sister, and six months pregnant with Blue.  The pond was frozen over.  I stepped out onto the ice so that I could say that I was on Walden's Pond.  K and my sister's guy stood on shore shouting at me to, "Bring the baby back on land!"

"Itzel" Mayan for "rainbow".

    Wishing you all a colorful week of glittery things.

still wackadoodling

    What to do with that strange little group of tufts?  

    A weird pink flower, of course.

    Still going...  They are becoming fuzzier with all of the handling.

    This silliness is lightening the air and aura.

    I can't help but wonder if there's a Who living in there?

    Image from Horton Hears A Who by Dr. Seuss. (Theodor Seuss Geisel)

dallying with dots

    Jude inspired some dotty thinkings.  Not quite sure, but curious about how the swiss dots/clipped spots might work, I decided to give it a whirl, because what's not to love about dots?

    Jude described the making of them as "...extra threads are loose woven all the way across the cloth and just caught in certain spots. They are clipped back later."  So, it started with threads going across.  Because of the tiny gap from each stitch, I worried that the dots would open up to the sides when they were cut, rather than stand straight up.  Going back and forth at different angles seemed like a possible solution.

    The first few were made with lots of little loops which were then trimmed down.  After these, the quest for success went all over the place.  The best ones were stitched by pulling the needle all the way through to the back of the cloth, and then bringing the needle straight back up as close as possible, allowing the threads to be packed into the same hole.

    Insecurity made me tie a knot through the gathered threads with the last stitch.  (My trust issues need more work.)

    What will be carried into the next attempt:  They took longer than imagined, and a lot of thread.  They'll be made further apart.  I'd like to try the line method again, this time with the needle passing all the way through to each side with each stitch, or maybe working them from the center out, spiraling rather than in lines.  So many ways to go...

    I'm sure this was a wackadoodle way of going about this- but they are cute, quite fuzzy, fun to touch, and it was really good to play.