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 Winter Bird

Here's a close-up on how the donkeys are coming along.  I gave them a little ground to stand on.

And here is another bookmark.  I used linen for the background.  This little bird I made using a stabilizing fabric backer because it's silk and was slippy sliding around something terrific.  Next time I'm going to experiment with starch and see if that will help with tucked-under applique.  Maybe it would be a good idea to work on a bigger scale!

The photo doesn't pick up the shiny thread moon that the winter bird is looking at.

And here is one more, an experiment, a sampler of all these new (to me) ways of working.  It is maybe Santa wading through the January lull.