Linen Evolving

A second hand find from a reuse store with the tag still on, this FLAX skirt is a nice heavy weight linen knit.  Something in the way of an above the knee aline skirt was my initial thought, but it is fairly flowy and there is enough fabric that I’m considering a new hollyburn skirt.  A great year round color (the above pic is more accurate)and a part of my palette that is currently under represented I couldn’t pass it up. Below you can see the inside.

Aline or half circle?  What do you think it should become?

Camp Week

It’s camp week for O, which due to construction has meant 4 hours of driving a day of pick up and drop off.  That doesn’t leave much time for crafts, particularly with prep for a bbq and the first day of school ongoing, however, a new first day of school rainbow shirt is in the works.  It just needs to be hemmed.  The same as before only a size larger and with a much more skillfully attached (and thus stretchier) neckband.

Still At It

This was the view during a brief stop on our bicycle ride this morning.  I’m waiting for photos of my last 3 sewing projects and working along on the grapevine tablecloth, but I do have some washed handspun to share.

 

Angel’s Wilderness Woolery

That is the name given to the small spinning school a friend started at camp this year.  Last year’s instruction was very informal with children practicing spinning the drop spindle.  This year each child received a homemade drop spindle  and one-on-one spinning lesson.  Watching six little people ages 5-11 fall in love with turning “fluff” into yarn sucked me right back in.  I finished spinning the skein I started back in 2015, wrapped that and another single ply on felt balls, then finished plying yet another skein.  Tomorrow perhaps I’ll get a chance to ply those.

Vintage Finds: Butterflies

One of my recent trips to the thriftstore turned up a pair of lovely vintage butterfly button embroidery kits.  Someday they would be a perfect learning project for the kids-until I needed a project for my last gaming session and realized that they could be turned into ornaments for the kids instead of buttons.  I freely admit my hands must be busy in order for my attention not to wander.  These were just the right speed for getting one holiday to-do crossed off early.  The right hand butterfly is waiting for me to remember (or look up) how to do a bullion stitch again, then it will be done.  I’m considering making an extra on muslin as a summer nametag for EGA meetings.

Eventual and Obvious Things

This is the final bunch of grapes on the inner border of my grapevine table cloth.  You can read more about that in earlier posts here and here.  It feels like I’ve finally made progress.  Perhaps this is the really the only time of year it gets worked on.  High hopes, but little practical application can make that happen.  It still wouldn’t be this far, but the wrapped bars and woven dove’s eye band of Isabella didn’t go well…three times.  More precisely it went well, but the woven dove’s eyes squish all together once I take it off the hoop.  They just look like ugly knots.  This may require an email to the instructor, but it’s currently being ignored in self-defense.  Perhaps I’ll skip to the next row and then come back later, but for now I’m inching along with what may yet become a tablecloth someday.

Sewing projects are piling up, but making no progress.  Having purchased the Carolyn Pajamas pattern from Blank Slate Patterns on my anniversary trip to Boston a little over a year ago, and fabric for them last spring, I am just now recalling that I hate pants and wondering if I also hate flannel pants.  I own some and they are my favorite things to toss on for sleeping when I’m camping, but never come out when I’m at home.  Is it worth making Carolyn Pajamas for Camping?  What do you suppose the probability is I’d wear them while not camping?

Isabella

I’d forgotten how relaxing and meditative pulled/drawn thread embroidery can be.  It takes a few stitches to get the new row down, but then it’s quick and easy.  I’ve missed this.  The apparent wavy quality of the stitching row is just due to uneven tension from the hoop, which just barely has enough fabric to hold in the middle.  It should get better as the piece progresses.  Until this point all of the work was actually completed in hand, which is my preferred method for pulled and drawn thread pieces, but the teacher for this EGA GCC recommends a small hoop, so it was time to give it a try and it is actually easier for the peahole hemstitch.  In case you are unfamiliar with this stitch, what you are seeing here is actually the back of the work.  The front is a bit neater.

My thoughts on this project so far?   It took a ridiculous time to prep the fabric.  It isn’t really necessary to baste all of the hemlines with counted stitches at a counted distance.  The saving grace there was the fact that preparing the fabric was lesson 1, so at this point I’m already about halfway through lesson two of  six.  The directions are thorough, but I must admit I’ve found them a bit trying-just a learning style thing I think.  for the peahole hemstitch I used this online tutorial, which has much clearer pictures, since the grey on grey on grey in the manual wasn’t clear enough for me to follow what was above and what was below.  Maybe if each picture were directly next to the instruction it is trying to illustrate rather than a row of instructions with a group of small pictures grouped nearby/around it, almost certainly an attempt to save space and cut down on printing costs it would have been clearer.  Could I have sorted it out?  Almost definitely-with a photocopy, scissors and tape, but google was so much faster and kept me working along at a nice clip instead.  I do not mean to indicate that the instructions are bad.  They aren’t.  It’s just that I’m not feeling patient enough for them.

In other news, he Love Birds ,which I like to thing of as Blue Birds, Pillowcase is finished.  I won’t bother with another photo, you can see the first one on my Vintage Linen’s page.  Boy did updating that make me feel like I’m not making any progress.