Mobile stitching

Trying to create a habit of taking projects to work on with me everywhere.  Sometimes I forget but yesterday I had a long wait in a waiting room and made good progress on the little Agnes cloth.  It's for Liam's quilt but hasn't been stitched down yet.  The second example is an experimental combining of 2 cloths.  Both pieces use techniques from Jude's workshops.  These are so light and manageable and fun to work on that it makes waiting into treasure time.

It's been pretty cool lately, perfect for walking; here's a scene from relatively nearby, Jewel Lake(perfect name):

Some progress

After several attempts, I have finally added my header picture...that is the running horse above.  Perhaps there is a way to have the title letters below the picture, but so far that process eludes me.

That little cloth is about 5" high by 9.5" long. Today I embroidered the bee on.  The almond growers in the Central Valley of California are having difficulties with bees too ill to pollinate, so this little bee is a prayer for help for our bee colonies.  


The orangey-pink fabric in the background is a linen that I dyed with onion skins from Trader Joe's.  It was a bag of multi-colored pearl onions.  I read about the process and that citric acid would help to set the color, but I didn't have citric acid, so I added the peel from a clementine and boiled it all together.  It made a beautiful color, but this is not a sturdy cloth, even though I stitched everything securely.   I felt commited  and went ahead with the project anyway but I doubt it would withstand a trip through the washing machine.  Also, I painted starch on the horse so that I could applique him more easily to the background; this helped. After the initial applique, but before the couching, I soaked the background plus horse in warm water to take out the starch because I read that silverfish like starch.  As you can see this is all very experimental.

Lastly, here is Agnes, my dog who is the size of a large cat.  She is a little skeptical about all this experimenting but is supportive for the most part.

Donkeys and Crows plus

This is a work in progress.  The farm I love to visit has donkeys.  One day during Christmas I stepped outside thinking I heard the donkeys braying, but it was a big flock of crows.  They both have nice raspy voices, and it was the time of the blue moon, so I've been thinking about all that.  Then today, because of a post on spiritcloth.typepad.com (January Thaw) I realized there are 2 ancient dresses far back in the closet that I believe were my grandmother's.  We called her Ninawr.  They are stained and not really wearable so perhaps I will put them to use as elements to enhance these cloth pictures, as I used fragments of her shawl in the frog bookmark.  Here is what they look like right now. I am showing them like this because I don't want to think of them as dresses or it will be too hard to borrow from them.

 

A bookmark frog

Yesterday I made this little frog.  It took 2 days, because the first day was spent trying to come up with a good plan.  Today I put on the backing and will mail it to my aunt who has always made hand-made gifts for us all.  I wrapped a little bit of my grandmother's shawl around the top and bottom. 

I bought the background wool at
woollymammothwoolens

The idea for a bookmark came from
gerdiary