Like Honey from the Rock

After two months of no free-motion embroidery, I finally risked a little stitching on Honey today. My hand was a little sore afterwards, so clearly I'll have to work on this fairly gently. The progress I've made is probably invisible, as it was more medium values that hopefully will give the impression of rough rock textures. I'm working from darks to lights, so I'm quite encouraged to have reached values that might be considered light.

A couple of people commented on Honey in ways that made me realise they didn't understand what I was doing. There aren't any appliqued shapes, just a collage of rock images, which are being created in stitch on a printed background. Here's a detail of the lower left corner. You can see the area that hasn't been stitched yet (it's a very light section)but the rest of the shapes are created by blending machine stitching, mostly free-motion straight stitch but some areas have free-motion zigzag stitching. This is why it's been so time-consuming! Every section has to be stitched in multiple colours.

Scatterdays Letter A, round things, vegetables and Things you like the smell of

Another Scatterday already!

Today's Scatterday is brought to you by the Letter A:

I love vegetables but artichokes are awful and aubergines barely acceptable. The article I adore is asparagus. Lightly steamed, with a dab of butter - bliss! Here is my asparagus in all its glory, in various states of appreciation and... utterly absent! Yum.

In the round, I bring you those blessings of the modern world, analgesics, including the useful aspirin, and for those who prefer to keep the doctor away, apples.

Lovely smelly things include my roses, which are just finishing their annual, or sometimes biannual, appearance. This rose was in my garden when we arrived in 1984. I was told by a rose fancier that it's called "Abraham Lincoln", though my books say that the red rose like this is actually called Mr Lincoln and I don't think this is it anyway. But today I'm believing the rose fancier. The scent is one of those dark rich rose scents that fill the house from one bloom.

Next week: The letter is O and the categories are Breakfast, Shiny and Little Things.

Talking about pointy things..

...here's a little smidgen of a secret thing I'm working on. It's for a challenge and I'll show more when it's been revealed next year. This is just the beginning of much larger piece. It's quilte a simple construction - vliesofixed shapes on a background and stitching over the top.

Scatterday J, pointy things, restaurant and sport

Oh dear, a sad haul for this week! I decided at the start that the things I photographed would be on my daily round, not something I made a special trip for. There are no restaurants beginning with J, or Japanese resturants, anywhere I went this week, and while I had brilliant ideas about sport, no javelin throwers, ju-jitsuists, judoers or long jumpers presented themselves locally, despite diligent searching. The space in a croquet hoop is called a jaw, but the croquet players were washed out this week, and the local sportspersons have hung up their football jerseys for the season. C'est la vie.

I should have known it would be like this because I found my pointy thing almost immediately last Saturday. Here it is:

These are jenny calipers, also known as hermaphrodite calipers. They're used to scribe a line parallel to the edge of something, so the hook end goes around the edge and the pointy end does the scribing. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio..."

A bit of dressmaking

I've been busy doing little bits of this and that, but not making huge progress on anything. But I have cracked the pants fitting problem, at least until I gain or lose weight. I seem to have been living in jeans, because I couldn't find ready-made pants that fitted well and were in fabrics I liked . This is what the first pair looks like:

It's a lousy photo, and I should really have been wearing shoes. I had great plans to have David take a better photo but that deoesn't seem to be happening, so this one will have to do.These pants were made from mid blue drill as a toile, and have a back zipper. I'm not mad keen on back zippers, so the next pair, almost finished in black drill, has a standard fly front and jeans-style pockets. They're a bit looser because I forgot that I had allowed slightly-larger-than-usual seam allowances for fitting. But they are still wearable, which is good since I have no intention of taking them apart! I have about half a dozen different pants fabrics waiting their turn now.

Scatterdays Letter P: red, sweet, metal

There's an overwhelming red tinge to my photos this week. So many P things on my travels were red..

First, I'm very partial to piquant red peppers, don't they look appetising? We always buy Pontiac potatoes, too. And lest anyone postulate improper premises from the preponderance of provender among my photos, here's a picture of a perennial plant called a pink, (which, confusingly, is red) in a pot which, with its pink and purple pals, will be planted in my personal plot presently. And who could survive without the postbox, which is both red and metal? Certainly not the person who pushed past as I photographed it, to post her very pressing piece of postage. Another metal, but not red, is David's Prius, of which he is very proud.

Oh, there's those peppers again, because of course they are sweet peppers, but in case someone perpends whether I'm paltering, there's also some plum jam which, curiously, is also red, and another plant from my garden called a polygala. OK, I know its flowers are purple, but its common name is Sweet Pea Bush.

Whew, this is becoming hard work!

Scatterdays

My friends Michelle and Pennie talked me into doing Scatterdays, an idea dreamed up by Michelle and Dy to encourage us to take more photos and blog about it. Each week we have one letter, 3 categories and have to find and photograph something from each category that starts with that letter. Why? Just for the fun of it! This week's letter was F and the categories were Cold Things, Signs and The Elements.

OK, I found heaps of signs I liked. Mr Fong and the entire Asia Pacific region seem to have joined together to sell Fresh Food in Eastwood shopping centre, and I couldn't resist the ubiquitous Fire signs (how often do you actually notice them in public places? Let's hope we never need to know where they are!) I am always amused by these Floodway signs in the middle of the same shopping centre (just outside the library). Guess why this is a Flood-prone area? Because, in my mother-in-law's childhood in Eastwood, this used to be a LAKE! People went boating on it. Now it's an oval and a shopping centre but nobody thought to tell the water. (I guess this could count as an aspect of The Elements too?) And Francis the Fresh Fish Man has been coming, in various guises, to my local shopping centre since before 1984, when we moved into this area. (I think we're on Francis IV.)If you look carefully you can even see a portion of Francis' anatomy that I won't name.

I had fabulous ideas about cold Food but, just to be on the safe side, I photographed the very tidy Freezer of my Fridge, with Frozen Peas and other Frozen Food. But then I thought of those great staples of Australian entertaining, Feta cheese and French Onion dip. And I am Fond of Feta and David's Favourite dip is French Onion. (OK, maybe Fish ones, but he got French Onion...)

I foundered upon The Elements. In the final absence of the photos of the Hawkesbury River in flood, which are clearly among those photos *not* carefully put into photo albums, I fell back upon this photo of fractonimbus clouds from Lord Howe Island. I should make you look it up, but I'll be kind. Fractonimbus clouds are raggedy, broken-up, wispy clouds formed by wind or air currents underneath a layer of nimbus (rain-bearing) clouds. You can see them on the lower part of the nearest cloud. So now you know.

P, you say? And Red, Sweet Things and Metal. Hmm. How obscure can I make this without driving myself nuts?