Free-IQTest.net

Free-IQTest.net - Free IQ Test

(Got 134 first time) I often have to guess the number sequence things, so I suppose, if I knew how they worked, I might have got a slightly higher score - assuming I didn't guess them correctly,that is!!=)

Try the test, it only takes less than 5 minutes and is quite fun.

EDIT: 13 May - test re-taken after I learned a bit more about how some of the number sequence things worked. Actually, I felt it only helped with one question, I still had to make guesses at the other 2, but I know I was now able to get that one right and got 144! Well chuffed! I've up-dated the above graphic to reflect this, with a small adjustment for the fact that I remembered one of the pattern questions and one of the number sequences and was able to do them faster than I would have done had it been fresh. I always did think there was a distinct element of education/experience in IQ tests as opposed to 'raw' intellectual potential. This experiment kinda proves it...

The Ebbs and the Flows

Well, it seems like I'm far from the being the only one whose finding their stitching motivation a bit slack at the moment. In fact, quite a number of bloggers I follow have been quiet of late or are finding that life is getting in the way of their arts and aren't producing much to blog. I've only done the outlining on two of the blackberries since I last posted. Sometimes it's lack of time, sometimes lack of umph and sometimes that I'd just plain rather watch a YouTube film!!!

School is quite a lot of work trying to keep up with everything and keep head above water with the tests that are fired at us on a three times fortnightly basis - two sentence dictations (quite a challenge in Chinese characters at times as it's so easy to forget how to write them, even though you can read them fine) and a written paper. Still, they make one learn and, with someone like me, that really is needed, so on the whole I don't mind. However, it does leave one a bit drained at times - mentally, if nothing else. So, not a very productive time creatively just now. Having said that, I did manage to get the next issue of 'Creative Embroidery and Cross Stitch' at the Eslite bookstore nearest to school (they're great for foreign magazines - including titles I can't get at home, so that's something I really like here!), and so I now have full instructions for that fantastic little house you saw on the cover of the last mag show.=) I don't think I'd make it exactly as it is in there, but the idea is great and I hope to do one one day. Perhaps a timbered house. You know, those white ones with the black timbers on, Elizabethan styling. I want to have a go at an embroidered garden one day too, so that super book, 'Embroidered Knot Gardens' is going to the top of my wish list.

We've decided to get a place with an extra room when we go home. Said extra room will be my studio, which will double as the guest room (i.e. the sofa bed will be put in there and we'll get a new suite for the living room). So, guess who's all excited and has the whole thing almost all planned out in her head? Just what I've been wanting for years, I'm so pleased about it. All I need now is for it to come to fruition.=) Look out for more on that early next year...

So, I think things will be fairly slow stitch and arts wise during the rest of our time out here, but I will be keeping up as best I can, so please don't give up and unsubscribe/delete your RSSs or links etc. In fact, the more readers there are, the more I feel duty bound to entertain you, so don't leave, but join up en masse instead, and let me know you're there.

Here are a few nice photos of places we've been in Taiwan for you to enjoy in the meantime. Some of the hundreds of pix I've accumulated so far will no doubt end up as inspiration for later work. (The photo above is an 'old' stumpwork piece I enjoyed doing 5 years ago.)

Stitching again

So, I had a couple of weeks off! I just lost interest in my needlework, but I think that, like Carol-Anne with her recently illness related stitch lethargy, mine was caused my viruses and the general tiredness inside and out that accompanies them. Added to that that I'm sick of Chinese classes and really keenly looking forward to going home to a sane country where I don't have to fear there are roaches in my kitchen cupboards, I can get food I can relate to as food and things in general are just a tad more 'with it'. I've been reading an ex-pat forum thread about some of the dumb traditional health beliefs that people around here have, and they really do believe them quite passionately! There are married couples disputing regularly over whether or not one should drink cold water.....

OK, moan over and I'll show you the first half of the back-stitching that I've been doing over the past few days on the field mice. I've done all the dark red (on the flower and rose hips) and the brown on the mice and stems, and just have the white outlining on the berries and the greens around the leaves and leaf veins to do. I did pick up my goldwork the other day only to find that the copper Jap thread went bad again. The metallic wrapping stuff keeps coming off on the very short length I need for that back part. Well, I'll just have to keep trying until I succeed, but, as failing with that makes me put the project straight back down in annoyance, I think I'd better stitch a new bit first and then have a go at re-doing that copper Jap!=)

I finally joined the local library and read a new US teen book called 'Viola in Reel Life' by Adriana Trigiani, who some of you may know from her novels (which I haven't read). It was an interesting excursion into the world of US teen-dom, but I rather doubt that a 14 year old really knows as much as Viola sometimes seems to and I wonder if the author really remembered the time zone differences when she has Viola video-conferencing with her parents in Afghanistan and old chums in NYC at times that seem to be me to be very antisocial for the other party. She also seems to me to be marvellously logical and to reason things through in a way many adults couldn't manage. Anyway, it made an entertaining read and, as it'd free, who can complain!? I also got Oscar Wilde's Complete Short Fiction, but the other classics they had at the local branch were all things I knew well already. Might do for light reading sometime, but I feel ready for something fresh and I'm not really into contemporary things, by and large.

And I really want to get a viola.....

Background stitching done

Here's the current field mice photo. I finished the background half stitching a little while ago and so am now ready for all the backstitch outlining there is to do, and there's quite a lot! Still, it won't take long once it's started - as with most things - especially homework and ironing!!!

No more done on the goldwork, I'm afraid, I just don't feel like doing anything that intricate and fiddly at the mo as I'm down with a bout of tonsillitis, but on the mend.=) Actually, once I've got started on a goldowrk piece, i usually find it hard to keep going with it. I guess it's really not my thing, although I admire the look of it tremendously! How Mary Corbet has the patience to do the lucious pomegranate she's working in silk shading and goldwork, I can't imagine! Maybe I should take 'The A-Z of Goldwork' off my Amazon wishlist after all.....

I won a give-away recently (possibly by virtue of there only being 4 participants and 3 prizes!!) and here it is. It's the needles really, but she kindly included the DMC floss as well.=)

I also got these 2 magazines at one of the big bookshops here in Taipei, neither of which are available in the UK. Well, one of them is, but only in London, I think. Just look at the cottage on the cover of the Aussie mag! Talk about wow! Daresay I'll never make it up, but I'd like to do something like that at some point. I was thinking of a cottage style jewelry case as a C&G assessment piece, but that kind of pre-supposes I'll ever get around to taking C&G!!=) I'm bacl to thinking about language based studies again now, but there's no need to decide for a long time and, as I've been reading all the Wiki How Tos on not worrying about the future, being patient and so on today, I will not fret about what I may or may not do in a year or more's time! There's a dictation tomorrow and I will work on that instead!!!=)LOL

I now have 65 followers, many thanks to all and also to the other almost as many who follow through Google Reader and anyone still tuning in via Bloglines (don't! It looks rotten on there!!)

Field mice cross stitching finished

Yay! I've finally finished the cross stitching on this piece. Next up is the half-stitched background colour (a paler green), and then I make a start on all the back stitch top-stitching of which there is quite an amount. Still, it'll bring the piece to life, even though it's very cute already, don't you think?=) I hope to have the background done over the weekend and get the back stitching done over the following week or so.

I did a tiny bit on the goldwork yesterday in that I took out the offending piece of copper Jap thread on the left hand side and cit another piece ready to 'fit'. I'm afraid it will 'fray' again, but I'll just have to keep on re-doing it until I'm happy with it, then I'll move on to the f-holes in gold Jap.

I'm not sure if many of you know about it yet, but there's a new ning stitching community that was started just last December called Stitchaholics. It caters for all forms of stitchery, but is more chatty than Stitching Fingers (which I enjoy as a more serious forum for needlearts), and the creator, Caroline from London, is looking to expand the community in the future. It's a 'by invitation only' group, so if you'd like to join in, please leave me a comment with your e-mail addy if your comments don't normally send it (ie if you have no e-mail addy available on your public profile here), and I'll send you an invitation.

The weather has gone mad here again recently and, although it was in the early 30sC at the weekend, it's now in single figures again - but, set to start to rise back to late 20sC+ from Friday. Then, of course, back down to about 12C middle of next week! As soon as the cold and rain started, so did my cough, and I took a day off school to rest today. We've been back a week and my new term enthusiasm is flagging somewhat already!!

On a stitching go slow...

Badly timed one as well considering that the TAST2 challenge has started. Still, I never expected to be able to join in all of it, esp. given that Tuesday is a rather impossible day to give a lot of time to needlework and always has been, but I plan to try and do it about once a month all being well.

Haven't done enough on either of my projects to merit a photo, only a little bit on the 2nd mouse on the cross stitch and have only touched the goldwork to move it to a safer place in the living room, but I hope to get on with both this weekend. I'm now back at language classes and trying to get into a good routine of study. Last term was silly, trying to cover far too much material and not enough time to practise using it or really learn it. This term looks much more balanced and I should even get a grammar book worked through.=) I'm trying to get almost all of my school work done actually at school, so that I can relax more at home and not feel I can't stitch as I haven't done my homework yet!!!

We went to a national park and the coast last Sunday - Tuesday (photos soon to go up on the Taiwan blog), and I bought some tribal inspired stash whilst I was there. There are 2 packs of quilting fabrics, one which looks typically Eastern and the other rather tribal. The chap assured me they were Taiwanese made, although they have Japanese on the label. I wasn't sure whether or not to believe him, but I remembered that quilting crafts are BIG in Japan and so the main market for those products will be through exporting up there. Anyway, either way I liked them. The bands are used extensively in Taiwan Aboriginal tribal clothing etc and so I got some of those as samples. Don't know what I'll do with them beyond using them as examples in my later C&G diploma country studies (although Taiwan is not strictly a country....), but they make a colourful addition to the stash, no? The picture above is the shop's display of the bands, or at least the top half of it. The bottom half was covered as it was raining. Fancy that! The weather is still totally mad here with torrential rain one day and temperatures soaring the next. A dull, overcast and drizzly time was forecast for our trip, but the sun came out with a vengeance and I, who wasn't prepared at all well, got rather nasty sunburn! Thankfully, although I've never had it before, knew how to treat it by applying cold, wet cloths to get the heat out and using lavendar essential oil etc. Peppermint oil soothed the itching later and the patch is beginning to heal nicely without any blistering or peeling.=)

I added some Pages to my blog recently. Nothing really exciting on them, just a start made at introducing my stitching history and so on. The page on goals is general, not just embroidery, and there's my CV for fun!! Might put more on it later on, we'll see. I also cleaned up the sidebars to just display a Gallery of favourite pieces rather than 3 years' worth that took an age to scroll through.

Goldwork in progress proper

Here's the viola in the hoop and a start made on the stitching. The photo isn't clear (as is to be expected when having to take it in artificial lighting, it doesn't seem to be get very light today), but you might be able to see that I've done the foreground outline in gold twist thread and the outline of the back of the instrument in Kreinik #7 Japan thread in copper. The small bit on the left went rather bad, so I'll be taking that out and re-doing it. I've also just noticed that an angle in the copper outlining on the right hand side doesn't match the gold. Grrrr! Perfectionist, me? Not that you'd notice - if you were blind!!!!=)

I plan to do around the scroll, fingerboard and tailpiece in the pearl purl that came with the kit and was originally meant to go in these places, just putting the scroll detail in in finer Jap thread. The f holes I'll do in Jap thread too and the chinrest I'll probably fill in with Jap thread, kind of in or nue style, but I'm not sure about this yet. I could even be persuaded to do this in kid leather, but I may leave it almost to last. The big issue is how to get the bridge higher than the pearl purl will be so that the strings will look right and not go upwards when they get to the edge of the fingerboard. Sometimes it's easier not to feel such a commitment to getting the details right!=)LOL!

It's absolutely slinging it down here in Taipei and the Gov't issued a cold weather warning on Sunday as temperatures dropped to just under 5C overnight in the very north of the island. That may not be cold for those who have -20C to deal with in the winter, but this is a sub-tropical island with the southern third fully tropical and there is no heating installed in the vast majority of buildings. I just read that about 10000 fish died in Changhua county thanks to the cold! Our two heaters are doing sterling work and we're OK and even getting our washing dried, but it's a bit boring having to waste the whole week's holiday stuck indoors! Nothing much to do but read, study, stitch, watch DVDs and listen to music. We've just braved the rain to get some groceries in, but the local supermarket is v low on fresh produce given that it's still officially New Year's holidays. Thankfully, I stocked up well before the break.=) So, plenty of chance to get on with my embroidery, but I doubt I'll do anymore on this viola today. I'm really dopey at the mo, would prefer to work on the mouse for a bit and, frankly, I forget how monotonous goldwork can be!!!