wordless Wednesday

March ?

Already ?

YES

We had some wonderful springy days

last week :
a lovely Zoo-day with the youngest grandson,
much needed gardening
and even some stitching outside !

Though the cold (and drizzle)

have returned today,

I finished the last bit of a small piece

that really looks like SPRING, I think.

"our beginning"

(cell, sun, earth ? )

I started with a very THIN piece of striped cotton

that was resist indigo dyed, 

of course with some felt as backing.

The theme for last week was "couching":

sewing thick thread (too thick to embroider with)

in one way or another onto the surface.

You often use plain strait stitches,

but in fact a lot of other stitches can do too.

Here I used cross stitches to fix the long floats around the circle.

It was fun to see the light shining through the thin piece

I finished it all with some seed beads and tiny gold specks.

P.S.

Today my dear friend Mo
had the opening of her exhibition
of her wonderful stitching project
in which a lot of our friends were allowed
to participate :

"I dream of a world where love is the answer"

https://www.yumpu.com/en/embed/view/jAPBognX9aze8GcS 

colours !

I'm always fond of

funky colour combinations

(at least I know not everybody loves

my sometimes bold choices)

So making these small

(10 x 10 cm or 4 x 4")

embroidered pieces as extra TAST works

gives me the opportunity

to try out different things.

"Faraway universe"

In the sun the purple looks a bit more reddish

than it really is

Some hand dyed fabric (and some from the shop)

and a little piece of silk

made a lovely base to start on

I couched some thick silk yarn along the round cut

of some of the snippets.

Added more purple but also blue, turquoise

and some red wool.

(the colours on that second picture are in fact best)

(love the feel of the spider stitches)

19 - 2 - 19

A VERY VERY PRECIOUS DAY :

today two long-time friends

(mother and daughter)

visited us.

  

A good forty (!) years ago

they lived in our village and we became friends :

the mothers and the daughters (mostly)

(because the mothers and the fathers had the same names, we always

referred to each other as "the other ..." , our children called us at 

our first name instead of mom and dad )

They moved somewhere else in Holland

but we still kept in touch though not as frequently ...

And then the parents moved to France

(without their (almost) grown children)

But from time to time we wrote.

After some sad time

now my namesake is visiting lots

of old friends in Holland.

For the "girls"it was about 30 years since they

had seen each other !

WHAT A SWEET MEMORY-DAY IT WAS !!!

(the connection)

just lovely

A sunny day

the first that let us think that 

SPRING

is not so far away anymore.

(though the rest of February and also March

can be rather cold still)

Ahhhhh !

There was some stitching of course

10 x 10

in black (gray) and white.

wordless Wednesday

buttonhole

Stitching is still "hot"

It's so easy to take with you :

a cloth

a needle (or two)

some threads

and scissors

...

on the boat,

in a waiting room,

at the Alpaca knitting group

(no ... they didn't mind !)

I did some really small pieces

with mostly ONE kind of stitch

buttonhole stitch

Cotton (in fact for crochet), embroidery floss, rayon and silk

on shot cotton (with a piece of felt at the back)

10 x 10 cm

Initially I did one like this in reds

on white cotton with a ragged edge,

but stitching on the edge

on not easy then !

So for the blue one I took a bigger piece of fabric

but still a 10 x 10 piece of felt.

A nearby trip last week

through a foggy landscape

resulted in this gray and white

feather stitch piece.