There are still spaces left for The Basics Workshop! This workshop is for any and all who want to learn basic design concepts, techniques, stitches and have lots and lots of fun. Hurry and sign up now before it fills up.
I did a livestream for my Patrons yesterday using my newly organized space and I have to say, it’s working! I did a few tweaks, because of some suggestions from all of you, and have purchased a little side table, I think people use these for working in bed, as it’s an L shape and has two shelves at the bottom, so I am thinking/hoping that will help with the thread storage and needing/wanting to see everything situation. I’ll report back!
In the meantime here is the revised sewing area.
And the revised stitching area. I tried to put the plastic bins vertically, but any time I pulled a thread from one of them everything came tumbling out, so I’ll have to rethink that.
But all in all I think this is doable. Of course, like any true New Yorker, I’m always secretly coveting the empty elevator shaft that is directly behind the wall I face now while stitching. Recapturing it has proven to be more than a little challenging, but I do continue to hold out hope.
So beyond my various stitching projects, I still have my Pat Pauly quilt that I began and haven’t done much with since taking her class. Still it’s hanging here on my design wall, waiting for me. Oh! And I’m determined to test out my GoPro before going on our crazy African adventure. More on that next week.
I just had to add this Youtube video of cats interrupting people as they were being televised. Too funny. My particular favorite is the cat who crashed the fashion show and struts down the catwalk!
I’ve been traveling. Though I must say that though this trip to visit my mother and sister is a long one, involving connections and then an hour and a half drive, it was about as flawless and easy as traveling can be during these bizarre times.
First off, the La Guardia Airport has done an impressive job with its renovation, they even have a water feature with Frank Sinatra’s New York, New York, playing. Hilarious.
We arrived to an almost empty airport and though the plane was packed, not a single seat left unoccupied, the airport was calm, clean, well staffed and easy to navigate; even the TSA line was easy to move through with no lines or delays.
With one brief stop and connecting flight we then picked up our rental car, also no line, and drove the hour and a half to my sister and mother’s. I’m always relieved when a rental car has a gear shift that isn’t a button under the radio. It’s the small things… so yeah, this was a breeze. My son drove, while I provided the navigation. There was only one “incident” involving a rotary, ambiguous signage and some panic on my part, but after the second or was it third go around, we made it out to the correct exit. Props to my son who took it all in stride and kept calm.
Once at my sister’s we were greeted with this.
Buck’s Moon, which was much redder and larger than this photo is able to show. It was beautiful.
The moon was unlike anything I’d ever seen before, glowing red and enormous by the time we arrived. It’s called a Buck’s Moon because it’s the time of year when the bucks grow their new antlers.
The quiet and beauty of the land is always striking when I come out here to visit. Because of COVID it’s been two years since I’ve been able to come out to visit. It’s wonderful to see my mother and sister again. And then of course there are the animals. Lots of dogs, chickens, horses, and those are just the animals that are raised here.
Life is good when surrounded by dogs.Nora
But what about your stitching? you might rightfully ask. Never fear. I brought three projects with me and my GoPro, which I’m hoping I will figure out how to use during this trip.
Linen hand dyed and gifted to me by my friend, Pat Pauly.
This piece is just about finished, I think. Though as I look at it now I am already thinking – well, what about that blue area in the upper left, I could add something there and then there’s that red/magenta bit to the right, maybe I should add somethingthere… For now though, I think I will move on and let this sit for awhile. One follower had some great ideas regarding the brown wool strip at the bottom, which I think I might experiment with. Right now it’s looking at bit like an “add on” and not really part of the rest. I’ll have to think more about it though before doing anything. Oh except I brought this thread that might be perfect for it and I could… and so it goes.
It’s lovely to see my mother and sister again after so long.
As I mentioned in my last post, I put my hand stitching aside in order to take a Pat Pauly virtual workshop. It was all about line, setting, composition and boy did she pack a lot into those two days. So much fun!
I’m not a quilter. I just have to say that. I mean I love quilts and I love seeing what others do, but I cannot sew seams so that they meet perfectly, nor can I manage to make those points that people do with ease, and a 1/4″ seam on any kind of regular basis baffles me. If I manage to get one, it’s a gift, and I appreciate the beauty of it, even when using a 1/4″ seam sewing foot, I still don’t seem capable of it. The fabric bunches up, the little guide line gets in the way, oh right, it’s there to help me, but it never really does. Anyway, the whole thing ends up as a disaster, but Pat… Pat’s work is much more fluid and isn’t exacting, it’s improvisational and she talks about how the various parts need to speak to each other. This is exactly what I say and do when I’m hand stitching. Is this area having an interesting conversation with this other part? Is this thread bossy and taking over? This is a language I speak!
But then there’s the whole using a sewing machine aspect to this sort of work. I get the appeal, it’s a whole lot faster than hand stitching and one can do things that you just couldn’t do hand stitching, but it still comes with its own set of pitfalls. At least it does for me. On day 1 of Pat’s workshop everyone was racing ahead with the next set of instructions on setting a shape into another piece of fabric and things seemed to be going well. I mean the whole 1/4″ seam thing continues to elude me, but I’ve made peace with that, so all was well.
And then my machine ran out of bobbin thread. Now normally this wouldn’t be cause for great distress, but in my case, this is a newish machine, having traded in my Bernina 880 (which was in the shop more than it wasn’t) and so here I was with my new Bernina 790. It’s a beautiful beast of a machine that uses different bobbins and a different bobbin case than I’m used to, so after a little struggling I managed to wrestle the bobbin out of its little case and then tried to put it onto the bobbin winder on top of the machine. Except that it didn’t fit. I could hear Pat in the background giving valuable information that I would no doubt desperately need, and yet here I was with a bobbin that I couldn’t figure out how to refill. No one must ever know, I thought as I desperately tried to make the bobbin winder work. Finally in a moment of panic I jammed the bobbin onto the winder and then manually held the little lever so that it would wind. Sort of. I then yanked the thing off, put it back into the machine and tried to sew, only now I started getting an error message.
Having now completely missed the last important instructions from Pat, something I knew was vital information to have, but never mind, getting the bobbin to work was taking all my time and energy. What to do? So I did what I do when my computer or phone starts behaving oddly, shut the whole thing down and reboot. Every now and then Pat would say, “So how’s it going _______________” and I would say a silent prayer that she wouldn’t call on me and then I’d have to confess to everyone that not only was I incapable of sewing a 1/4″ seam, but I also had no idea how to refill the bobbin. I could hear everyone else in the background, machines purring happily as they created tiny works of beauty, while I, in all my shame and humiliation, couldn’t manage something so simple and basic!
As I waited for the machine to turn back on, I went in search of my instruction manual, only I’d done a very thorough clean up just the day before and so who knows where that thing was!? Finally I located it and saw that I’d put the bobbin upside down onto the little bobbin winder. It’s a wonder I didn’t break the machine! But never mind, eventually I got the thing working and off I went, making tiny skinny lines in various places. cutting up new pieces, placing shapes within shapes and having a blast. Even better, no one seemed to notice that I was having a tiny crisis!
I would show you the whole thing, but that will have to wait until another day when I have something that’s not quite so “work in progress”!
I have this dream that one day I will be able to keep my sewing machine out all the time AND have my hand stitching and threads all out in another part of the room so that I can seamlessly move from hand stitching to working on the machine and back to hand stitching without having to put everything away each time!
Yesterday I launched my latest design, Making Waves: A Drawstring Bag in my Etsy Shop! I also made a short video for it. My instructions are very, very detailed. I include everything from how to begin, to how to stitch this bag together and film all stages of the process. YouTube videos demonstrate every step so you can follow along. Each video is embedded within the instructions using Hotlinks. As I spend, literally, hundreds of hours video taping, editing and posting each video before embedding it within the instructions, my downloadable patterns are a bit more expensive. Not much. A little. People tell me they are well worth it.
This project began as a Stitch Along with a group of 17 hand stitchers who signed up for the class, which took place over Zoom. Over the course of 8 weeks we stitched this bag together and had a blast doing so.
A couple of people have asked me whether I will be doing this class again, so if you’re interested let me know as I will do it again, if there’s enough interest. The Zoom classes consist of eight one-hour classes although I would be open to doing a five-day workshop with classes running a 3-4 hours each. You can use your own threads or opt for a thread kit. If you choose a thread kit I will need to order in advance and we will have to wait until everyone has theirs to begin. This can take anywhere from one to two months, depending upon availability of the threads and how many people want kits.
I am also beginning a new design, which will be another Stitch Along, meaning that I will be designing this project as we go! What’s fun about that is that each week I unveil a new part of the design, which is fun and exciting. Once I have the basic background concept designed, I will post more about it. Right now I’m in the midst of throwing a lot of different ideas around and seeing which one I like best as well as determining which will make the most sense to add a lot of embellishing to it. As with the Making Waves design, I will be incorporating a great many different techniques and materials, such as hand dyed t-shirt scraps, hand dyed cheesecloth, wool roving, Dorset Buttons, beading, ribbon work and other fun things like that.
Dorset Buttons in the Background of Making WavesHand-dyed and Ruched CheeseclothHand -Dyed t-shirt
As this post’s title suggests, there’s a little something for everyone, but let’s start things off with Fiber Talk!
In December I was interviewed by Gary Parr and Beth Ellicott for their podcast Fiber Talk, also available on their Youtube channel, Flosstalk. We had such a great time covering a whole variety of different topics including inspiration, finding your voice, color, color theory, art, choosing threads, improvisational stitching and life in general. Fiber Talk just released our conversation Sunday, so go have a listen. We had such a good time and I hope you will too!
You know things are difficult when my mother sends me several videos within a few days of each other. This is something she started doing when COVID hit hard this past spring in an effort to cheer all of us up. I’ve been posting many of the things she sends on this blog ever since. This last week I was the lucky recipient of THREE wonderful videos from her. The most recent is from the New York Philharmonic, a performance of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now.”
Another was this, which is particularly hilarious because many of my descendants are German and this sort of humor is exactly what we have often noticed and commented on.
Finally there’s this, which is just an amazing and beautiful example of creativity and where it can take us. If you don’t like the colored lighting shots, skip ahead to around the five minute mark and look at the other absolutely spectacular work made.
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