White Threads

knitting project in the wings

I wrote a little while back about the fact that I currently have a need to knit. Its getting colder here, and yesterday I wore my first woollen jumper (sweater) of the season. I have a jumper that will need to retire this year, as the elbow is wearing through. Its of just a strange enough colour that I won’t be able to match it to make repairs. So to me, that means I need a replacement jumper, and perhaps an additional new one, for the new season… I refuse to buy acrylic jumpers as I just don’t find them warm enough, and for women’s clothing, that’s all you can buy in the shops, unless you’re willing to pay through the nose.

So knitting a jumper myself, it is. 🙂

I was having a browse on the Bendigo Woollen Mills website (the home of quality, well-priced yarns except their crepe ones, which I think are simply awful as they just say “school jumper” to me!), and found two yarns that I quite like: Rustic in Delta colour, and Melody in Forest. I’d actually really prefer the Melody to come in the Delta colour, but Bendigo has never been particularly good on colours. I like the Melody for its lovely smoothness. I’ve never seen this particular yarn in the flesh, but I have seen similar ones in the shops, and they are simply gorgeous.

Then I needed to find a pattern to use, so off to Ravelry it was. I began searching through the patterns and almost immediately found and fell in love with this. Its called Baby Cables and Big Ones Too, by Suvi Simola (I think you’ll need to be a member of Ravelry to view that last link). The pattern is available for purchase through Ravelry. I bought one almost immediately, and now just have to choose which yarn to use with it. Either will work, but part of me likes the blue, and part of me just can’t pass up the smoothness of the Melody yarn. My husband thinks I should purchase both, and whichever one I don’t use for the “replacement” jumper can be used for my “new season” jumper.

He’s a smart man. 😉 (He also thinks that if I get a new jumper, then he’s entitled to one too. I think that’s fair.)

Royal Easter Show

I spent yesterday at the Sydney Royal Easter Show, demonstrating on the Embroiderer’s Guild of NSW stand. There were four of us there, and we all turned up with quite different embroidery to work on. Well planned? No, just complete chance! 🙂

As always, it was lovely spending time with other embroiderers, talking embroidery, thread, fabric, sewing, sewing machines, textiles, fashion etc… The day went very quickly, and I was pleased to get quite a lot of embroidery done. I was working on some Portuguese whitework.

I took a half an hour to have a little wander around in the vicinity of where the Embroiderer’s Guild stand was, which was situated in the Arts and Crafts Pavilion. Now, the Royal Easter Show is really all about the country coming to the city, but to me, its always been about the arts and crafts.

So I took a wander through the crafts section yesterday. When I was little, I used to dream of having something of mine in the Cabinet of Excellence display. I used to look at all the embroidery and be completely inspired and amazed. My first embroidery that went in the show was entered in the needlework section when I was in Year 10 at school. It was part of my school’s entry in the school section. We won, thus whetting my appetite for more competition at the Royal Easter Show. I entered quite a few more embroideries in the needlework section over the years, and made it into the Cabinet of Excellence twice, I think.

Well, yesterday’s viewing of the competition was really quite depressing. There were hardly any entries. It has been getting less and less each year, and is now really very small. Sometimes there are only three entries in each category. The standard didn’t seem particularly high, though there were some outstanding entries.

I have wondered many times over the past few years why it is getting so small. I’m sure the organisers have wondered the same! My thoughts are that perhaps it is just a reflection on society in general – not so many people are involved in these painstaking crafts anymore. However, even the patchwork section is getting smaller, and as far as I know, patchworking is still going strong. Another reason could be that the prizes are ridiculously small (for the amount of work that often goes into a piece of top embroidery) and the entry prices are too high. Perhaps the categories aren’t meeting the needs of embroiderers who want to enter, but can’t find an appropriate category.

Its not a problem I can solve, but it is sad to see.

In my wander around the vicinity of the Arts and Crafts Pavilion, I avoided the Showbag Pavilion – can’t remember the last time I went in there. I visited the one where there is clothing and “lifestyle” stuff; the Dome, where all the food is, and the district exhibits; and the other “lifestyle” type pavilion adjacent to the Arts and Crafts. The food used to interest me, but now I walk through and note all the things I can’t eat anymore, legacy of having had Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. The Lifestyle type displays show many things that “might” make my life better, but probably will really just lighten my wallet.

As for showbags, I think I’m still feeling culture shock from returning from Ethiopia there. In my mind, they are full of overpriced plastic junk that’s going to break, sit uselessly on the shelf, or be used once and then discarded.

I did NOT get the chance to go to see the animals – my purpose was to be at the show for the guild, not for sightseeing – but I feel that not seeing those parts of the show really left me with a very skewed opinion of the show. Because of the things I did see, to me, it seemed very much about overconsumption (of food and non-food junk) and consumerism. It seemed to be about excess and spending money.

It left me feeling quite sad. I must still be feeling quite a lot of culture shock.

The land of the public holiday

Over the past week we’ve been away for a few days, and then enjoying some of the many public holidays at home. Australians tend to believe that we live in the land of the public holiday because we get so many (though this is a claim hotly contested by Ethiopia, as we found when we were living there last year!). Over the past week we have had about 3 public holidays – I think. I’m not really sure about it all, actually!

However, I know that we had a public holiday on Good Friday – one of the few days of the year when practically everything is shut. Try being out of town for that, and it severely limits your options for what to do and what to eat for the day! Then yesterday it was Anzac Day AND Easter Monday. Easter Monday usually is a public holiday in lieu of not getting one for Easter Sunday, because its a Sunday when many people don’t work anyway. But then today we get yet another one, in lieu of the one we didn’t get yesterday for Anzac Day because we were already having one for Easter Sunday… Got that?? Whew!

Anyway, I’ve had a really nice break over the past week. Apart from going out of town for a few days as a family, I also did a 20km training walk for the Walk for Women, went to some museums and galleries, made a new dress, went to see a friend in the lead role of the Evangelist in the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs’ wonderful performance of Bach’s St John’s Passion, had my favouritest aunt stay over for a night, went to church, went to the Anzac Day dawn service, and generally just had a nice time!

Today I’m off to the Sydney Royal Easter Show to demonstrate embroidery on the Embroiderer’s Guild of NSW’s stand, which should be fun. And tomorrow, I’ll actually get back to work!

Anzac Remembrance

Today is Anzac Day here in Australia and New Zealand. Anzac stands for Australian and New Zealand Army Corps. We commemorate and celebrate the sacrifice that Australians and New Zealanders have made in war on this date because it is the day that the ill-fated landing was made at Gallipoli in World War 1. The scenes of slaughter of the Anzacs that ensued, as they were cruelly mowed down, is regarded as the beginning of Australia’s journey towards real nationhood. It is seen as when we came of age as a nation.

For the first time today, we attended the dawn service at Sydney’s Cenotaph Memorial. We left home at 3am to catch the train into the city to attend the service starting at 4:30am. Apparently it always rains, and today it did also. Despite the rain though, it was a moving service. There is a march through the city later on, but we decided not to stay for that as it would be some hours in the rain before that even began. Another year.

Straight on the back of Easter, it has been an interesting time of remembrance of sacrifice. Over Easter we celebrated Christ’s sacrifice in death for us, his rising again and triumph over death, and the fact that through that we are saved by him.

I hope that Easter was a special time for you too.

needing to knit

With the weather getting colder here, I’m feeling a need to knit! Over the past few years I have knit about one item of clothing each winter season, sometimes for me, sometimes for one of my daughters.

For quite some time now, I’ve had a ball of Sirdar Snuggly Baby Bamboo sitting on my desk, looking at me every time I’m working at my computer. Its such a lovely soft fibre, with a very nice sheen. I bought it to see how it would work for embroidering with – not well – so now I have it to do something with. Not sure what.

However, I’m thinking that I’d really like to knit myself a pretty cardigan this year. I seem to have a lot of polar fleece for winter, which while warm, is not always the nicest look! I searched through patterns at Ravelry to see if there was something that I liked, but nothing really caught my eye. So the search continues.

And of course, I’m not really sure when I’m going to find the time to do this, when several dressmaking projects are still in the queue!

getting ready for the craft show

Over the past little while I’ve been preparing my stock and display ideas for the Sydney Craft and Quilt Fair that I’ll be exhibiting at in June. I’ve been ordering in new stock (not necessarily new products, though there are some of them) so that I have a good amount on hand.

I received some new stock of the Mountmellick knitting cotton the other day and was pleased to find that it is now being manufactured in Australia again. It had gone off shore and I felt that the quality of presentation and packaging had dropped. I wouldn’t say that the quality of the knitting cotton itself had dropped, as it didn’t seem to me to work any less successfully. But it is great to know that we are back to nicely shaped balls of knitting cotton, on sensibly shaped cores!

I also plan to have my new Cosmo Seasons fob kits ready for the craft show. I have all the supplies now, and have settled on how the kits will be presented, but I now have to write up the instructions for each kit.

In the midst of all this, I’m still working on my book… Ah, the fun simply never ceases!

book cover design

I’d really love to have a prospective cover for my upcoming book “Portuguese Whitework” on show at the Sydney Craft Show in June. That means that I need to get onto it now. It usually takes a while for me to start “seeing” properly when I do photography. It takes me several film’s worth (what an old concept a roll of film is!) to start seeing artistically, with good composition.

So I took some photos the other day of one of the completed embroideries for the book. I did some close up, some further away, some angled, some straight… lots of variations.

Then I chose the best of them and placed them in a layout that is the size of the book. I put the words on, and moved things around. I like to have the title of my book quite close to the top as it means that if its in a rack of books with only its top showing, you’ll know what its about.

Because of all the words at the top of the page, it usually means that there needs to be a reasonably blank bit of image behind it, so that the words and the image are not fighting one another. There’s not much point in having the words there if you can’t read them on top of the photo!

Creating a good cover usually takes me quite some time. I usually create heaps of different ones, using different images, different layouts of the words, different colours for the lettering, different typefaces. I refine my ideas as I go, discarding designs that don’t work so well.

The book title itself is also really important. It has to reveal the contents of the book in just a couple of words. Its the ultimate poetry really! I use my subtitle to further explain what’s in the book.

For my Ukrainian embroidery book “Ukrainian Drawn Thread Embroidery: Merezhka Poltavska” I had to be very careful about the title. How many of you would confidently walk into a shop to ask for a book called “Merezhka Poltavska”? I suspect most of you aren’t even sure how to pronounce that – and quite rightly too, as they’re not easy words for an English speaker. But I needed to include those words somehow in the title because they accurately name the type of work it is, for those who do know a little more about these things. Merezhka is the type of needlework, and Poltavska means that it comes from Poltava. So they became the subtitle, and the main title was more descriptive.

I am in a similar situation with my new Portuguese book, because once again we are dealing with non-English words. So again, I will need to be creative with my naming.

It is fun solving all these problems!

training for the Walk for Women

We had a wild weather day on Saturday – it was cold, windy and poured all day. This wouldn’t have been such an issue if we hadn’t planned to celebrate the Rainbow Girl’s birthday as a bike party at a local park! It was hastily replanned, and we had it at home, doing some craft instead of riding bikes.

Rainbow Girl LOVED her rainbow dress and rainbow leotard. She also received a rainbow headband from one of her friends, to match the dress (and it does, perfectly!) and brightly coloured stripy tights. She wore the whole ensemble to church yesterday and then to the shops afterwards, and it was lovely to hear all the compliments she received on it at church, and watch people at the shops having a quiet smile to themselves about the brightly coloured little dynamo that was passing them!

In the afternoon I decided it was time for a training walk for the Walk for Women (of which I plan to walk about 20-25km of the full 50km). Fortunately the weather was much nicer than on Saturday, so I plotted a route to a park some suburbs away and walked there and back. It took me 2 hours and 6 minutes to go about 10.5 km. My little toes were a little sore at the end, but I am happy to report that today I feel fine! My friend is planning a 20km-ish walk next weekend, which I will join her on.

The Walk for Women is raising money for the Addis Ababa Fistula Hospital in Ethiopia. You can learn more about the hospital at the hospital’s website. If you’d like to sponsor me in my walk, you can donate online via the Australian fistula fund website using the Donate link. Please specify “Walk for Women” in the Event section. I’d love it if you let me know how much you’ve donated in sponsorship of me, so that I can feel warm and fuzzy about it!

Me in the Simien Mountains in the north of Ethiopia, at 3200m altitude. Behind me is an escarpment, dropping 1 - 1.5 km to the plateau below. It gives you an idea of the rugged terrain in some parts of Ethiopia.

shingo sato in Australia?

I had an email conversation with Shingo Sato last week. If you have no idea who I am talking about, head on over to trpattern‘s channel on YouTube and take a look at his amazing pattern design tranformation and reconstruction videos. Shingo’s techniques formed the inspiration for my rainbow dress.

I had been watching the balloon sleeve video, and about two minutes into it, it occurred to me that something strange was happening. It seemed to be playing backwards. It looks very strange when scissors move through fabric and *uncut* it! I had no idea if it was just playing backwards, or if it was an operator error on my part! (Mmm… just had another look, and it still seems to be doing it.)

I wrote to him to let him know that the video seemed to be playing backwards. Anyway, in the course of our conversation, it came up that he’d love to come to Australia to do some workshops. I pointed him in the direction of a business that I thought would be really suitable for collaborating with on organising such a tour. We’ll see what happens. Personally I hope that it comes off, as I’d love to do one of his classes!

hoops, Portuguese whitework and bullions

I took my Portuguese whitework with me to Singleton, to work on the rather long train trip. During the class, I was talking with the ladies about good hoops for Mountmellick embroidery, and explained that deep hoops such as mine are really good for Mountmellick because they have more wood to grip onto the fabric with than a thin and measly hoop. They are also more stable when working with the heavy satin jean fabric of Mountmellick. Binding the inside ring is also helpful for gripping the fabric. You can purchase these wonderful embroidery hoops with stands from me at Vetty Creations.

So I pulled my hoop out to show them (minus the stand which I so helpfully left at home!), and sort of side-tracked the discussion, while they oohed and aahed over my Portuguese whitework that was in it! They’ve now invited me back next year to teach them that.

It is interesting to see the reaction that Portuguese whitework elicits. Because it is so different to what people have seen before, it really catches attention. While I’m sure the bullions put some people off, the overall effect of them with the eyelets and the drawn thread work seems to just be very appealing.

If you do like the look of the little snippets of my Portuguese whitework that I’ve had on the blog over the last few months, but are scared off by the bullions, then I offer you a challenge: the best way to conquer bullions is to *practise* them. And doing a Portuguese whitework project will give you lots of practice!

Another tip I have is to take a look at my bullion knot tips, posted some time back. You can read my original posts at:

And if you haven’t tried it, give the method I show in The Left-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion and The Right-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion a go. When I teach bullions in my classes, there is usually a least one person who professes strong hate for bullions. On trying the bullion knot method as shown by me in my classes and in my stitch dictionaries (one I was taught by Effie Mitrofanis) they usually go away feeling that they too can do good looking bullions!