Bullion Stitch - Take a Stitch Tuesday

I experimented with the bullion stitch this week making a conventional picture with different flowers and a flying insect. Before I started the picture on the right, I looked through back issues of Inspirations magazine to get ideas. Most of the flowers are stitched using gumnuts petals, the bug has rayon wings and a purple cotton overdyed body. After some practice, my skill with the bullions improved and I think that most of them look pretty good. My son pointed out that although the flowers are fairly realistic, he has never seen a purple bee. It is stitched on a piece of overdyed cotton -- I bought a bag of pieces packaged for crazy quilters and then forgot about it. I will probably use them for finishing cross stitch pieces but I could use them to make crazy quilt blocks using some of my TAST experiments with flowers as focal points.

I also experimented with adding bullions to the free embroidery piece that I started last week. The cream is silk and the green is a DMC linen thread. The additional stitches add some textural interest and more color to the piece. I am starting to like it a bit more than I did before. It is interesting -- I described this piece last week as a mess but someone saw it in the TAST Flikr group and added a comment to indicate that they really liked it.

In addition to stitching, I finished reading The Peoples Act of Love by James Meek and started reading The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards. I also watched The Big Sleep this afternoon -- I love watching Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall together. I have been entertaining the cats by winding yarn into balls and I successfully started my first sock. Maybe later this week, I will be able to post a progress picture.

Fruit and Flower Shares start . . .

I finished a 4th of July project today it is a Silver Needle Secret Needle Night kit. Yesterday, we had a fairly quiet, family oriented day. We had 4th of July food -- hamburgers, hot dogs, macaroni salad, potato salad and strawberries. Then we went and joined the neighbors to watch the fireworks. Our dogs stayed home and protected the house.

Today the fruit and flower shares started so in addition to vegetables, I picked up a bouquet of flowers and fruit. The vegetables selections included beets, Japanese turnips, cippoline onions, garlic, lettuce, cilantro, parsley, arugula and broccoli. The fruit includes organic blueberries, sweet cherries and black raspberries. I cheated and didn't keep the beet and turnip greens because I still have kale from last week and we will be on vacation part of next week but the newsletter had a delicious recipe for beet greens in a coconut curry sauce with pasta that I may have to try next time.

The flowers, as always, are beautiful and I enjoy having them in the house. We have flowers in our garden, but we grow random perennials and do not have much of a cutting garden. I love all the different colors of sunflowers that we get throughout the summer, you can see a deep red one on the right side of the arrangement.

As I have been shuttling kids to karate and back, I have been reading. I finished Sara Gruen's book Water for Elephants yesterday. It was very good -- she presents the main character in his 20s and 90s and presents both well.

Take A Stitch Tuesday

A quick post of my Take a Stitch Tuesday samples. First a grid based doodle using left over perle cotton. The picture is a bit crooked but the stitching is not. I used several different combinations of half chevron to form a border -- filled in with wheat ear and then experimented with different stitch sizes. I had to quit when I ran out of thread.

I also experimented with using this stitch for free embroidery on a piece of Silkweaver solo. The fabric color really does not come across well in the photograph -- it is more red. I used some random pieces of Gentle Arts Sampler threads with different ply to stitch with -- the shape is outlined in split stitch and filled with half chevrons and french knots. The idea is a rock or a piece of coral but I think it needs some more work to develop into anything other than a mess.

A reading weekend . . .

Not much stitching this weekend but a lot of reading. I finally finished Memoirs of Hadrian this weekend. Yourcenar writes beautifully in French and the book was beautifully translated into English but this is not a quick read. I read through most of the discussion from the Book Group List. Unlike most of the readers on that list, I found Yourcenar grounded in the tradition of old French heroic literature with Racine rather than writing a novel about ideas and philosophy or starting the modern historical novel/non-fiction biography. The difference could be that I studied French Literature in college rather than philosophy.

I went on to read Elizabeth Bowen's book The House in Paris and Ayn Rand's Anthem. The House in Paris does a good job of portraying the events through a child's eyes as Henrietta observes the adults and Leopold in the beginning and end of the book. I am not sure that it does as well with the adult characters in the middle. I need to think about it some more. Anthem seemed to me to fit in with 1984 and Animal Farm or even with C.S. Lewis's science fiction as a modern day retelling of the story of Adam and Eve. Maybe now I will be motivated enough to finish Team of Rivals.