Illness is a waste of time!

What a time we've had of it since my last post! We've both had feverish colds, but I decided to branch out and develop a vicious sinus headache for almost 2 days, and now am fighting with tonsilitis that doesn't seem to wish to clear. Hmmm. Well, at least I got back to the water violets yesterday afternoon and evening.


This photo shows progress from the last two stitching sessions. I don't think it's terribly well worked and I'm dismayed at how little I'm enjoying it really.=( I guess I just have so many 'brain' projects going around in my head at the mo that stitching isn't top priority and I feel like I'm being kept away from my reading and study!! I haven't the least umph to get on with the other project(s) either...

I've just applied for a job in the local university library looking after the East Asian Studies collections, which requires reading ability in Chinese/Japanese/Korean. I'll probably not have too much competition for it, unless there's a PhD student in the School who needs funds and/or someone's been telling the Oriental students about it. Still, precedence should go to Brits unless no suitably qualified local can be found. Anyway, we'll see. It's so hard to get a job that I'm by no means holding my breath, but you never know.

Getting sick of stem stitch

I've moved on a bit with the Water Violets and fish design, but still wading through all the copious stem stitch on the underwater fronds! Still plenty to go.... I'm hoping that I can get most of this design done within the next week as it's the main wedding gift from one couple to the other and is also the simpler to work. Slightly depressing that a few commenters liked this design and didn't say my own was nice. Sigh. Still Ms Stevens has considerably more experience and knowledge of nature than me, so I can't expect too much more!!=)

As many will know (and be experiencing themselves), winter has hit here. It's pretty unusual for snow to start in November. In fact, it's only the last 2 years that we've really had old-fashioned winters again in the UK - the last I remember was when I was about 15 in 1986/7. These were taken through our living room window about 5 minutes apart this morning. Snow was actually falling in the first shot, but not enough to show up. Good studying and embroidery weather!! Glad we did the shopping on Monday and that we don't have to go out until tomorrow evening. There is an advantage to not having got work yet!!=)

Too many WIPs!

I usually make it a rule to have no more than two decent sized projects and one small one (such as a bookmark or a piece for a card) on the go at any one time. At the moment I am in serious violation of that with four projects in progress and none of them qualify as a 'small' piece by my standards. Here they all are laid out temporarily on the ironing board. (Through the window you can see what very wintry weather we've having at the moment too!)

There are to be two gifts for my sis, the personal one from me to her that I showed the design process for yesterday, and the promised blue cushion cover which I agreed with her as the 'official' wedding gift before I left Taiwan. I bought a piece of blue fabric over there which is lovely, but I just couldn't get it to work with the sorts of designs I had in mind, so it's been put aside, perhaps to be used as a backing, in favour of a plain old navy blue. I've settled on a Helen M Stevens design from her 'Masterclass Embroidered Flowers' book. Here's the fabric ready and threads to hand (good old stranded cotton as usual - I've enough on with the silk on silk on the pouch!) with the piece I'm working from on the right.

Here you can see the first bits of stem stitch that I put in last night whilst relaxing in front of the telly and our old favourite 'Pride and Prejudice' video. (Yes, we still have videos!) Looks more black than blue here!!

Above we have the design traced onto the silk for the manicure pouch and the padding for the leaves and the upturned edges of flower petals attached. I plan to press on with the monogram part of it this evening as well as completing the stem stitch on the cushion cover. With an outside temperature of -7C at the moment, it's an ideal time for embroidery!

Designing a manicure set pouch

About five years ago, when my second sister announced her decision to (finally) stop biting her nails, I promised her that, when she cracked it, I would buy her a nice manicure set as a reward (and to fill a new need!!). I confess that it slipped my mind at the time and when I did remember (long after she no doubt forgot - she doesn't have my elephantine memory, lucky girl!!) all I could find on the market were trendy teenage designs that I frankly wouldn't insult her with. So, I realised I was going to have to make one myself. I bought all the things I planned to put in it - scissors, emery boards, tweezers etc, and did a design.

OK, so the project went no further. Problem I think was that, unless there's a discernible deadline, things rarely happen with me, so it got kind of unintentionally shelved and the manicure tools hujng around on my bedroom shelf for a long time. Well, she gets married out in Taiwan next month and alongside the 'blue cushion cover' we agreed on as her wedding gift, I decided it was high time that this other one was made and it's a great occasion to give her a personal something. Naturally, now the time is finally upon me to do the project, I can't find the manicure stuff!! I've seen them since we moved and I put them somewhere just too safe!!

I looked at the design I drew back in '05 or '06 for the pouch and decided that it was cluttered and just wouldn't work after all, so set out to rework it yesterday afternoon. When I went with Rosie to a stitching and craft show once, she'd admired the stumpwork blackberries on display in one retailer's booth and said, 'They look good enough to eat!' So, I there and then decided to do some for her at some point. Marrying the two ideas, we get the following design process.

I don't go for drawing things out and then re-doing it until I like the layout, so instead I drew a box the correct size and cut out a few berries, leaves and a flower (yes, I know blackberry flowers are long gone before the berries ripen, but this is only art...) and played around with them until I had an arrangement I liked.



The next stage is to draw out the best layout and colour it in (got a chance to use the yummy Derwent Coloursoft pencils I treated myself to on my last full day in Taiwan). This is basically what I'll be stitching, only the flower will be moved to the right a little so as to be at the end of the stem and thus look more realistic. I consulted my 'British Wildlife' book quite a lot during this design!!

This is the floss toss showing the Madeira silks I plan to use, the beads for the fruit and 2 options of lining material. Now the pink looks a bit nicer with the antique white silk - just matches better, but I know Rose likes green more, so I won't decide on that one yet, but will see how it looks when the embroidery is done.

I've cut and washed the silk fabric (which I think shrank a bit!) and I just need to check with Rose that she will take her hubby's name before I put her future initials on the back. I can't see her not taking it, but you just can't be sure, so better safe than wasting time on a 'G' when an 'E' was required.=)

Stitching due to start over the weekend, all being well!

My new pad

Does anyone else have this exasperating problem? That when you manually highlight the whole post, just to make a copy in case the publishing goes mad and deletes/connection times out etc, it just deletes the whole thing anway? I just watched that happen and, as I was taking it in and thinking, 'Quick! Take advantage of the 'draft save' facility, the dratted thing kicked in all over again and saved the now blank screen. Talk about raging!

Anyway.... This may well be shorter than the original was!! Click on the photos for clearer views if you want them.

Here we are all settled into our new home, which is somewhat bigger than our last and has given me my own study/studio AT LAST! As many bloggers seem to be reporting on their creative spaces right now, I thought this was a good time to get back to my long neglected blog. It's a very small room, as you're about to see, so you may have to breathe in...

This is my desk area. Thankfully, I have a big desk that can fit lots on it and still give plenty of room to work.=) On the front wall are things like favourite bookmarks and some souvenirs from our travels. I like the Korean dress (hanbok) best and plan on finding out a good deal more about things Korean in the future.

On the windowledge I have pots of pastel pencils (and brushes) and tubes of paint and the yellow container there is mostly flashcards for language learning - many of which are crammed with vocab I encountered on my recent course in Taiwan. On the right hand wall you can see scissors and tape measures for ease of access and there's my laptop open at my Google and Blogger homepages.=)

On the desk are the materials and initial design things for me next project. Not that I've touched the current two WIPs lately, but....

To the left of my desk I keep these three silver grey stacker boxes. The bottom one contains mostly regular fabrics, (although there are some nice cotton oriental rolls in there and some lurex seriously fancy things that I got direct from the mill that produced them as a child. My dad had his workshop just above the mill and rented from them. They gave me offcuts sometimes and odds and ends on reels of lurex!). The middle one holds mostly embroidery kits along with a bag of felt pieces and a folder of odds and ends of patterns - old iron-ons, for instance. In the top are counted thread fabrics, black, white and cream surface work fabrics and 'helpers' such as Vilene, Bondaweb and so on. There are also zips, trimmings and a few other things in there too.

Next to that we have a basketweave bag of hoops and frames and then my 'outdoors' bags, such as my handbag etc.

Onto the bookshelf space:

It wasn't possible to get a full length view of the shelves as the room is just too small and I was sitting well back on the desk in order to even get these! So, this is the top half. On the very top of the right hand one there are two baskets, one with my lovely oriental fabrics and the other containing my silk, satin and sheer fabrics - all carefully stored in clear plastic bags. The cat litter tray on the other side holds the audio components of some of the many language courses I own - cassettes and CDs aplenty.

The sun bleached out Japanese - Thai on my upper language shelf, (languages are stored alphabetically, but Chinese is kept mostly elsewhere) and the linguistics end of the lower shelf, so that's what you can't see well here. Science is at the top and in the box on the lower left shelf are my silk and fabric paints.

At the bottom here we have mostly needlework and art stuff. Lots of magazines as you can see and also many pads of multi-coloured art papers and tins of pencils. In the little 2-drawer arrangements are my pan watercolours (as opposed to tubes) and top quality pastels as well as a number of things like stumpwork wire and so on.

I'm hoping to get some shelves above where the stacker cartons are to get the boxes of greetings card blanks, papercraft materials, general stationery, pens and pencils off the floor under my desk!!

So, hope you're enjoyed this brief visit. I'll be doing my art, craft and design work in here, (as well as plenty of language study and some science stuff), but stitching will be on the comfy sofa in the living room as ever.=) Hope to be sharing the fruits of my labours in here via my various blogs over the months and years to come. Today I hope to get on with the finalising of the design here on my desk and get that into commission and will post more about that soon.

Cross stitch and Korean embroidery

So, here I am in the public library, using one of the internet access PCs there and just taking a few minutes to post some recent photos.

The first four are from our trip to Korea late last month. These top two were taken through a shop window (it had lots of horizontal bars across it as it was closed at the time and so I could only get these close-ups without the bars spoiling things), which seemed to be selling very richly embroidered 'hanbok' - traditional Korean dresses. I think these are likely to be wedding clothes.


Later on we visited a tiny knotwork museum where there was an embroidery display. These items here were used by the owner for her son's first birthday traditional celebrations.

This was the corner with several lovely embroideries and knotwork examples. Aren't they gorgeous?

Just before leaving Taiwan, I finally managed to get the field mice cushion made up and sent. It's been received and its new owner is delighted with it, despite it being somewhat uneven at the bottom, but she would never notice that!!

And this is how far I got with the narrowboat cross stitch piece whilst we were in Germany for the first 12 days of September. The last time I posted about this piece it was just the green blob on the right, but now, thanks to the brown and grey bits, it actually looks like a tree, bushes and a bit of a fence!

Thanks a lot for all the well wishes that came my way following the last post. Thankfully, it wasn't neuralgia, but a tooth nerve that had actually been sensitive for a whole year. After a deep filling coming very close to it, it went potty, but I've had the initial treatment done and, except some post-op type of discomfort, I'm pain free again.=)

Anyone whose been reading for more than a year will know that we had trouble getting our shipment through customs on the way into Taiwan. Well, our return one has been stuck there again for the past fortnight plus and they even planned to send it back, despite instructions on the address labels under no circumstances to do this! Anyway, we seem to have stopped that and are literally praying that they are finally satisfied with the documentation and can get the boxes to us soon! Also having trouble getting the new car insurance sorted, finding a new home, getting work organised and what have you, so all is anything BUT smooth right now! Still, the weatehr's nice, we have a place to stay for as long as we need it (within reason) and we're keeping on trying to get stuff done. It will feel all the better for the amount of work it's needing.....

© Elizabeth Braun 2010

We're home!

So, we finally made it back to the UK in the relevant two pieces and with all bags safely in tow.=) I won't be posting much, if at all, until we get totally re-settled in a new home as we only have a very slow dial up service here at my mum's and that's no longer really any good with today's web functionality!

We spent a weekend in Seoul, then almost a fortnight in South Germany and have got back just in time to miss all the flats/apartments we were interested in in the pre-univeristy term housing rush, but we'll find something in time.

Other than that, I have appaling neuralgia in my lower left face after having two deep fillings done in my teeth 2 days ago. I've been haviung nerve problems there over the last year and now they seem to be shot to pieces and giving my real hassle. Anyway, that should settle over the next few days and I see the doc on Monday about it too.

Will post more when I can! Hope everyone's well and will catch up with you when I get bcak to good old broadband!