White Threads

Valentino success

My back-ordered catalogue for the Valentino exhibition landed on the doorstep the other day with a loud and heavy thump! Its huge! I haven’t opened the parcel; just passed it on to my husband for him to give it to me for Christmas.

A friend who did fashion design at uni recently travelled from Adelaide to see the exhibition. I’d told her it was wonderful, so I hoped that she liked it. This week she reported that she loved it! She spent about three hours carefully inspecting the gowns, and would have spent more if family members hadn’t been getting restless. She also mentioned that a friend of hers who works at the gallery had told her that they have had triple the expected visitor numbers at the exhibition. Wow! I hope that means that we see more similar exhibitions here in Australia.

Powerhouse Museum, surely you can drag some of your extensive selection out for us viewing public to see? Anyone want to bring out an exhibition of Dior’s New Look? Or focus on embroidery in high fashion? Mmm… wouldn’t that be wonderful?

Christmas humbug

Well, that title has really Dickensian overtones, doesn’t it?!

About a week ago I posted about an idea I was having for adapting my Christmas decoration into a tetrahedron or triangular pyramid shape. I was reliably informed by several commenters that this shape is now referred to as a humbug, due to the resemblance to a lolly (candy) of that shape. Now, being a bit of a young-un, I’ve never heard of humbugs before, so I’ll just take your word for it!

Veronica referred me to the Victoria Sampler website where they had a competition earlier this year for a humbug shaped Christmas decoration.

I’ve made a little progress on my adaptation.
Its not finished yet as it needs more beads hanging off the bottom, but you can see how it is going. I feel it turned out a bit small – by looking at the needle it might give you a bit of an idea of scale.

I used beads rather than the Gilt Sylke Twist because its for my younger daughter’s teacher who loves sparkly things. She recently told me that she’s the type of person who puts glitter in envelopes with cards so that when people pull the card out, glitter goes everywhere. I told her that I’m glad she doesn’t send me cards!

So I think its OK, but I just would have preferred it turned out a bit bigger. I do like the way the design wraps around the shape and joins up with itself at the joins – I carefully stitched it by hand so that it would be just so (oh no, now a Kipling reference…).

An addendum to yesterday’s post about bullions. I mentioned that I spent the day “wrestling” with them. I just want to qualify that I did not mean I was having trouble with the bullions! I merely meant that I had such a huge quantity to get through that I felt like I was having a bit of a battle with them! I’m actually quite happy with my bullion technique itself, otherwise I wouldn’t presume to teach others how to do them in my books or with my bullion stitch tutorials. 🙂

me time

I decided that despite having a few projects that are just a little bit pressing, yesterday I needed ME time. I needed to feel like I was making progress on MY projects for my book on Portuguese whitework.

And so after racing off in the morning to the toy sale at a local department store to get a couple of kiddie gifts, I spent the day wrestling with bullions. For all those who hate bullion stitch, I guess that doesn’t sound like all that much fun. But I enjoyed it.
If you’re one of the people waiting on me to do something for you – illustrations or an embroidery project etc – I apologise. But you’ll get a much better result out of me if I am feeling happy and relaxed, rather than frustrated and put upon!

If you are a person who hates or is intimidated by bullion knots, do check out my bullion stitch tutorials:

a snatch of happiness

Just a small snatch of happiness from our house:

Yesterday my youngest daughter got glasses for reading. She has been desperate for them all week, ever since she had her eyes tested and was found to be a little longsighted. When I phoned the optometrist the other day to find out if they were ready yet, she was nearly putting on her shoes ready to walk out the door to get them. And then she had to be patient for another whole day! I’m sure she felt like it was almost killing her!

To see the huge smile on her face yesterday afternoon when she had them fitted was just delightful.

The optometrist said that we would not notice any immediate improvement with them, but I really do wonder if her reading sounded that little bit faster and more fluent. She’s really been struggling with picking up reading, so hopefully this will make it that little bit easier.

She’s so proud of her beautiful purple/maroon glasses, and can’t wait to show them off in class today. Hopefully the novelty won’t wear off anytime soon, and at least they are reading glasses and not all-the-time glasses like mine.

Just wanting to focus on the happiness in the small things of life.

award winning Mountmellick

Firstly, today I want to say a heartfelt thank you to those lovely people who emailed me yesterday or posted a comment to encourage me. I really appreciate the time you took to write to me explaining why what I do has made a difference to your life. It does put things into perspective.

Yesterday I was writing to someone who had been in a difficult medical situation, where something was very wrong, but the medical staff were just dismissing their concerns. Eventually it was happily resolved, but not without a lot of heartache where the people in the situation felt very powerless to help themselves because the people who should have been helping them weren’t.

As I wrote, it seemed to me not a bad description of poverty: the powerlessness of needing help to get out of a situation, and having no way to help oneself to get out. And thinking about poverty also puts my situation in perspective. I am so very blessed by God with all that I have, and it does give a feeling of responsibility to help others who cannot help themselves.

Anyway, moving on from the introspection (for now – I’m never far away from it!)…

The other day I received an email from Pia in Queensland (which is one of Australia’s states) who recently won second prize in a state-wide competition for a Mountmellick embroidery that she embroidered. The design was an adaption of my design “Snow White” which was featured in Inspirations magazine, issue 62 a little while back. Congratulations Pia, on your beautiful embroidery, and for winning second place! A well deserved result.

feeling down

I’ve nearly finished preparing my paperwork for my tax and am feeling very down. I’ve found that in that financial year I did a lot of work for very little monetary return. I remember many years ago being on a stand for one of the Australian magazines at a craft show. The daughter of the editor was also on the stand that day, and she told me a story of some person who once commented to her how fabulous it must be to be so rich – with her mum being editor of a needlework magazine. The girl just looked at her, amazed and incredulous that this person could think that that would make them rich.

I don’t know if the general public thinks that needlework designers are just rolling in it, but perhaps some do, seeing they seem to think its their right to steal designs from them by breaching copyright. (But that’s another issue…)

I think that part of this feeling down is due to frustration with not being able to get on with my next book very much. It seems that all sorts of other things keeping crowding in and demanding my attention: classes to prepare for next year, embroideries for gifts, embroideries for magazines, illustrations for magazines, and just life in general.

If money was the only reason why I was doing this career, then I’d be leaving ~~tomorrow~~ today. But there are other reasons, which my husband gently reminded me of last night. Yes, I could go out and get a “real” job, but it would not give me nearly so much satisfaction. And I wouldn’t be here with the kids, able to take them to and pick them up from school, take them to their music lessons, have them home with me for the day when they are sick etc.

But it would be nice to have a little bit more of a return for all that hard work. I’m going to need to take a long, hard look at my business over the next little while and see what’s wasting my time, and what needs to be improved. How to do that, I’m not really sure!

I’ll try to look at it positively: what I don’t earn, I don’t have to pay tax on. 🙂

And I promise that I’ll try not to wallow in self-pity for too long. There’s a lot I have to be thankful for. Sometimes I just need to deliberately and consciously remember those things.

Right-handed stitch dictionary reprint

The Right-Handed Embroiderer's Companion Happily, The Right-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion is selling very well around the world (as are my other books too!). Because of this, I’m running out of the first print run, so need to do a reprint of it. Doing a reprint is a great time to make revisions if mistakes are found. It means that the book can improve with age!

Have you found any mistakes in The Right-Handed Embroiderer’s Companion? I’d love to know so that I can fix them before reprinting, if possible.

Thanks for your assistance.

an auntie again!

As of Friday afternoon I am an auntie again! The baby is a girl and all are doing well. Mum told me last night that when the baby’s sister (3 years old) was told, she put her hands up near her face, shook all over and said, “She’s come out!!” Such happiness!

The baby is a girl, so I can happily decorate her lampshade with shadow work butterflies and not have to worry about thinking up a motif for a boy.

Congratulations to the family!

further adaptation of Christmas ornament

I’m having an idea.

A few years ago, I did a Christmas ornament (pattern available for purchase here) that was a triangular pyramid, or tetrahedron, which you can see in the photo. It was made of a strip that was twice as long as it was wide, or so I recall.

I was thinking that seeing my 2010 ornament is basically square (it has a single stitch that sticks out one thread more at the centre of each side), I could work two of them, right next to each other and make it into the same shape as my previous tetrahedron ornament.

That’s the idea. We’ll see how it goes. Stay tuned…

a farewell gift

Today at my biblestudy group we will be farewelling a lovely lady who is going home to her native China after a few years here in Australia, and a few years as part of our biblestudy group. In the time she has been here we have grown to love her questions about the Bible and the English words we are using. Of course, we have grown to love her too!

I usually arrive at biblestudy long before anyone else because that’s the time my bus gets me there. I put up the blinds, set out the chairs, clean down the tables, fill and heat up the urn. Then I settle down in the warm sun streaming in the window, and get on with some sort of handwork to pass the time. As people arrive they usually inspect my current project. Our Chinese friend is a creative type too, and on occasions has asked me to write down the English words for what I am doing: embroidery, knitting etc.

I decided quite some weeks ago that I would like to make her an embroidered bookmark on behalf of our group, for her to take home with her. I’m using basically the same design as my Christmas ornaments, but have made it into an ornament hanging off a metal bookmark finding. I decided a bookmark would be more useful than a Christmas tree ornament as I don’t know that she’s likely to have a Christmas tree at home in China!