Musings from The Tower...
This blog is mainly focused on my love of crafting. Embroidery, particularly cross stitch plays a major part but I will add any thing else that takes my fancy including, but not limited to Bollywood, Veganism, Yoga, Dance, Tarot and Pretty Things.
You know, the ones your bohemian grandmother would make, the one who spent her youth in Asia chilling out with Tibetan monks and learning yoga from a guru in Kerala. That one.
Using my new found crochet skills, I used up some bits of colourful wool that had been lying around FOREVER in my sewing basket.
These squares are all the same pattern but I tried to achieve different looks by changing the colours of the thread in different places and in different ways to create unique looking squares.
I hope to master a few new designs in the near future as I am planning to incorporate all my random squares in to one big blanket eventually.
I haven't been able to do much since I hurt my dominant hand last week while practising yoga. I've watched a few films but it seems odd not to be stitching at the same time.
I watched a film called 'Murder By Death,' on Netflix which is very much "of its time," with some painfully hammy foreign accents and Peter Cook pretending to be Chinese. I thought it would be a murder mystery like Poirot or some other Agatha Christie style of film. It was supposed to be hammy and slapstick but seemed to be somewhere between Monty Python, without the cleverness and a Carry On film.
I had to follow it with the French biopic of Edith Piaf, 'La Vie En Rose,' to feel better about myself. That was good, if a little bleak. Gerard Depardieu seems to have stopped aging a few years back.
I also watched 'Ishqiya,' a really enjoyable Bollywood black comedy thriller starring the always wonderful Vidya Balan, she's such an interesting actress to watch and seems to have a good eye for unusual box office success stories. I look forward to catching the sequel.
Well this ends week one of the torn ligaments saga, hopefully after a second week of wearing the itchy wrist support of restriction, everything can go back to normal and I can start stitching again.
Here are some progress pictures of a big project I've been working on, I've done over half of the cross stitches but there will be a lot of detailed backstitching and French knots before it's completed.
She's an oriental goddess of prosperity, another Maia creation.
I loved her the minute I saw her, not least because the image reminds me of a long time favourite film of mine, 'A Chinese Ghost Story.'
Incidentally, Xena Warrior Princess owes a debt to that film for some of its plot lines.
What an unfortunate week I've had, managing to tear the ligaments in my right arm doing yoga wrist stretches.
YOGA FAIL
In all my years of practising yoga, I've never managed to injure myself to this extent. I feel kind of foolish and also disbelieving, plus ouch!
I have to wear a wrist support for two weeks and as I'm right handed, this is a pain in all the ways...
In desperate boredom I decided to have a go at a small cross stitch project, using my left hand to do the stitching. I had to call upon the assistance of my partner for some needle threading though and I probably still overworked my right hand a little, it's hard to break the habit of a lifetime.
This was the first time I'd stitched on perforated paper and I liked it, very useful for stitching cards I imagine. The only tricky part was initially securing the thread to the paper as I couldn't use my usual fabric based method.
I've always envied the ambidextrous ability many left handed people possess in a world that doesn't want to acknowledge their existence. I envy it even more right now, though my feeble left hand is doing its best.
Here's hoping the next two weeks fly by and my wrist heals quickly and properly so I can get back to stitching and yoga.
The tagline for this film is "a love story like no other," which is a little strange given that it's a reimagining of Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet but it's Bollywood so it doesn't have to make sense.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if Romeo and Juliet is the most adapted Shakespeare play out there, but I'm too lazy to check that fact right now.
It's directed by Sanjay Leela Bhansali and as I'm a big fan of several of his other films, 'Devdas' and 'Hum Dil De Chuke Sanam,' being my personal favourites, I was very excited to be able to watch this at the cinema.
There's nothing here a western audience would bat an eyelash at but you only need to read youtube comments branding it as porn, to see how challenging the actors, particularly the lead actress, probably found some of those 'intimate' scenes. Women, as is the norm pretty much everywhere else in the world too, get most of the hassle in Bollywood. Their reputations are more easily damaged in the eyes of their peers and the audience choosing to watch or avoid them.
So it makes me really happy that the actress Deepika Padukone seems to be doing very well in Bollywood right now, Ram-Leela and her other recent film choices have pushed her in to the top spot and she seems very much to be the actress in demand.
Ram-Leela is the kind of film where you know, more or less, what's going to happen but the clever thing about it is that you still find yourself caring about what's going on and hoping for a happy outcome even though you know it's not possible because...remember...you're watching 'Romeo and Juliet' not 'A Midsummer Night's Dream.'
The location, the costumes, the music, all conspire to make you feel like you're lost in a crazy world where it could be set a hundred years ago for the most part, but then they pull out their mobile phones, drive cars and mix modern jeans with classic gagra choli's and gorgeous layered lehengas.
I'd kill for all of Leela's outfits in this film, also for her dancing skills.
I enjoyed spotting some places I visited in Udaipur during some of the scenes as well, even though it filled me with an intense longing to be there.
The most ambitious cross stitch design I've completed to date, (dragon aside.)
A beautiful design from Maia, part of a set of kits inspired by traditional Japanese art with a contemporary twist. I love the Art Nouveau addition to the traditional oriental elegance.
The intricate background was a challenge for me, lots of careful counting was needed as well as a great deal of patience.
I find shading in the squares of stitches I've already completed on the pattern sheet is very helpful to remember where you are, so when you pick the pattern back up after a while, you know what you've done and how much you need to complete.
However, I may have to find a new method for when I start following some patterns from my embroidery books as the idea of drawing in any book makes me distinctly uncomfortable.
There wasn't a great deal of backstitch to do with this design, which meant once I finished the cross stitches, it didn't take long to finish the rest.
She took me quite some time to finish overall, especially as I tend to stitch on and off in general, sometimes spending weeks stitching regularly and sometimes letting projects sit in a cupboard for a few months.
I'm very happy with her though and hope to get her professionally framed at some point to best preserve all my hard work.
After many, many attempts, my brain seems to have finally allowed me to grasp the basics of crochet, yarn round the hook and all that. Enough to practice some double and treble crochet knots and some tentative attempts at circular crochet at least.
I've still a long way to go before I'm showing off / boring you with dozens of pictures of adorable amigurumi critters; but I've mastered some basic granny squares and so I was able to create this giant granny square blanket, in preparation for my new nephew, due next month. (Hope he likes it!)
One of my first attempts at stitching on evenweave, as oppose to aida. I loved the blending of Victoriana kitch with the mythological unicorn. 'The Last Unicorn,' was one of my favourite books, growing up as a horse mad girl, without the horse. Just about the only creature that could trump a horse for me was the fabled horse with a horn.
Evenweave is a greater challenge to stitch on than aida but gives a more sophisticated finish and probably looks better when your design allows a lot of the fabric to show around the stitches.
The design comes from the, What Delilah Did Presents, 'StoryLand Cross Stitch,' book from Sophie Simpson. It's a nice little book with various cross stitch fairy tale inspired designs, with lots of different ability levels catered to. There is also a website called What Delilah Did with information and kits you can buy.
Lately I've been rediscovering the joys of Tarot with my beautiful new deck, the wild unknown tarot.
I find the total lack of any humans depicted in the deck both refreshing and disorientating, when dealing with the conventional set meanings for the cards.
The artwork is simple but evocative with mostly black and white sketches and spots of colour added to draw attention to focal points.
I think it will be a useful deck for learning to work with intuition over set definitions as it can be hard to apply the standard meanings to some of the cards, just going by the images.
The prominence of animals and trees in the deck make it easy to imagine sitting in a misty wood, a dark cloak keeping the damp at bay while drawing the cards and laying them out on a convenient smooth tree stump. Perhaps watched over by a glossy black crow. And that's no bad thing in my book, holding on to a bit of mystery in this very modern world we live in.
Stitching desperately in to the early hours of the night I just about managed to finish this "kawaii" cutie in time to present it to a fellow Japan-loving friend for her birthday.
I love the little details of the flowers on her kimono, the French knots on her sleeves and the subtle white backstitching on her obi belt.
I stitched this sweet little owl key ring the other day. I used a dissolvable canvas to stitch the cross stitch design on the felt. You need to soak it in hot water afterwards so that the canvas dissolves, leaving the stitching on the material.
Unlike waste canvas, you don't have to pick out the remaining canvas after soaking because it dissolves but you do need to use very hot water and to let it soak for a while or you end up with a sticky residue coating your stitching which is most unpleasant.
Another quick stitch. A cute daisy flower in cool aqua and green tones with a dash of contrasting red.
Always handy to have a few cards already stitched up ready to go to the perfect person.
I stitched this for a friend's birthday, her name is Rosie and the design reminded me of a Tudor Rose so I thought it was apt.
Small projects are a nice break after spending weeks or months on larger designs. I fit embroidery around work and other hobbies so it's not something I do every day. Large kits certainly take me months to finish.
The pattern reminded me of the Assisi technique, especially popular during the medieval era, where the background is stitched to produce the design on the material used, see example below...
