Katmandu Mandala

When it comes to embroidery I'm generally of the mindset that more is more -- you can never have too much embellishment. The quilter Mark Lipinski seems to agree, because he designed a line of cotton fabrics specifically for embellishment. Naturally I was all over that, and I picked up a piece of the orange fabric with mandalas and paisleys printed on it.

Before:

After:

Details:

From the inside out: The innermost ring is straight stitch in lime green with blue AB seed beads. The twelve-pointed star is in purple straight stitch with red AB seed beads woven in and out of the points (unfortunately the weaving effect is not as prominent as I had hoped). The next ring is back stitch in pink with yellow french knots, then green bugle beads with green french knots. The ten-pointed star is made from turquoise back stitch points with yellow satin stitch inner points alternating with pink chain stitch points with yellow seed bead inner points. Between each point is a star made from lime green straight stitches and a green silver-lined 8° seed bead. The next ring is feather stitch in red with blue purple-lined square beads. The ring after that is straight stitch in blue surrounding multi-colored sequins anchored by purple french knots. The final ring is cretan, bosnian, chevron, herringbone, and cross stitch (I got bored) in purple, threaded with pale green shimmery ribbon, and topped with beaded rosettes in dark pink and pink.

I want to applique this onto a patchwork made from brightly-colored scraps, but after that I'm not sure what I'll do with it.

Check out what other people did with this fabric here.

Beadboy 2's First Attempt at Sewing

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. Wow.

I'm not sure what I was expecting when I picked up Junot Díaz's book -- a novel that mixed Latino culture with nerd culture (something I can relate to -- if this song were called "Latina and Nerdy" it'd be about me), a post-modern book filled with arch references to literature and pop culture and lots of footnotes, certainly a well-written work of art (it won the Pulitzer). I didn't expect that I would devour the book in a matter of days, sitting on the commuter train and wishing it hadn't arrived at my stop so quickly. The mix of cultures and time periods and allusions was intoxicating. The book shifts between Oscar's and his sister Lola's lives as immigrants growing up in 80s-90s New Jersey, struggling to overcome family history and everyday indignities, and scenes set in the Dominican Republic in the 50s and 60s, detailing the horrors their family endured during the Trujillo dictatorship. The subject matter was sometimes harrowing, but there was a great deal of humor, too.

The most startling thing, though, was the language. Díaz uses a mix of Spanish and English, slang and ten-dollar words, complex sentences and fragmented phrases. The result captures your attention from the first page, and pulls you along faster and faster -- but never so fast you miss the images, the plot, the beauty of what he has created. This is a carefully crafted, exhilarating book, and I can't think of a single flaw.

More Progress

I'm on quite a roll.

This is a MillHill pin cushion I beaded and cross-stitched quite a while ago (two years, maybe?), but I never finished. All it took was filling a little cloth bag with emery (to keep needle and pin tips sharp) and sewing it shut (trickier than it should be, and I think I dropped some emery into my sewing machine YAY), then folding the fabric around the little bag and slip-stitching that shut. Now I have a nice, weighty storage spot for needles and pins by my machine.

This was a project from the 2008 Just Cross-Stitch Christmas Ornaments issue. I received the magazine that September, and to ensure I'd finish the ornament in time (ha!), I even bought the kit for it rather than searching for the fabric and threads myself. I did manage to finish the stitching a few days after that Christmas, but then it languished. But hooray! Earlier this week I made and attached the beaded garland (modifying it slightly from the pattern, so that the ends are beads not thread), and then sewed it to the backing fabric. The pattern did not give directions for how to finish it with the enclosed silk ribbon, so I picked the easiest way: wrapping the ribbon around the seam (especially necessary because I was too lazy to pick a matching thread) and tacking it in place with leftover beads. I tied the ends in a bow at the top, and added another length for the hanger. That hanger is not sewed on very securely, though, so I suspect I will have to redo it. But it is finished!

This is the sewing machine organizer I wrote about previously. Having cut out the fabric, I couldn't bear to let the project languish again -- I really need those pockets to keep me from losing my thread clippers and seam ripper. So I ventured up there late one night and whipped it up in just an hour or two. Looking at it now, I see I forgot to clip some threads; where's that clipper . . . .

Next up: finishing a tote bag. I cut the pieces out a few years ago, so it's about time I sew it up.

Book Round-Up

Man, I'm behind.

Jincy Willett, The Writing Class: As with Winner of the National Book Award, Willett excels at characterization. She sets up the class at the start of the novel with satirical caricatures of potential writers -- the woman who does not read but thinks publishing a book would be easy and fun, the socially inept nerd living in his mother's basement and writing scifi, the bored housewife, the professional who wants to be another Grisham or Crichton. But then we get to know them and can no longer dismiss them; instead, Willett forces us to see them as three-dimensional people, good, bad, flawed, or all three. There is also a bit of meta-fun; at the end, some members of the class begin asking for the details of how the murderer committed the crimes, but Amy, their instructor and the protagonist, brushes them off: "What difference does it make? . . . I'm not waving off the what and the why. I'd never do that. But the how bores me to death." And so we never really learn how either. Reading examples of bad fiction was fun too.

Geraldine Brooks, People of the Book: An excellent book, with a couple of exceptions. The structure was very similar to Girl in Hyacinth Blue by Susan Vreeland, where the novel goes back in time to tell the story of an object through various episodes in history. This book is based on the fascinating story of the Sarajevo Haggadah, with Brooks imagining a history for it as it survives through the ages. Some of the segments were a bit heavy-handed if very educational; I knew about the convivencia from my Spanish lit studies, but I had no idea Muslims and Jews coexisted peacefully for a long time in Sarajevo, and one section of the book shows Muslim characters risking their lives to protect Jews from the Nazis, because their cultures are so similar and they have to stick together and help each other because who else will, and ow, I just got hit by the Anvil of Irony. The sections where the protagonist, Hannah, interacts with her mother were unpleasant. I appreciate that Brooks did not go the standard route of misunderstanding, bad blood, misunderstanding, big cathartic fight, new appreciation of each other, but the resolution of their relationship seemed unduly harsh. They had huge problems, no question, but in light of all the atrocities in the book those problems seemed both not serious enough and too complex to justify the ending. I'm not sure why Brooks felt the need to include this in the book, except as a further illustration of her thesis that sometimes there is no happy ending, which was amply demonstrated elsewhere in the book. Overall, though, I enjoyed it.

McSweeney's 13: I like McSweeney's Quarterly so much, I wish I could get all the issues. This one had a comics theme. The vast majority of the works were comics, with a few comics-related essays; even the book itself was wrapped in one big comic sheet. The stories were funny, tragic, heartbreaking, disturbing, dull, clever, and beautiful. I was inspired to learn about the Métis and reminded that I really need to check out Love and Rockets (I just don't know where to begin). That's the best part of lit journals like this -- the exposure to writers and information I would not otherwise encounter.

Crafting Again

After a two week absence I finally made it up to my craft room. It was a disaster -- half finished projects everywhere. So after straightening up a bit I was inspired to make some headway against all those long-neglected projects.

First up was a "free-range" monster I wanted to make from an old issue of Craft Magazine (now defunct as a print mag). The pattern was very easy and deliberately imprecise, to encourage people to experiment (especially those who had never sewn before), though the actual directions were a bit twee. Over a year ago I made the pattern -- basically a oblong blob with legs -- but got no farther. (Just draw a simple monster shape on a piece of 8" by 11" paper until you get a shape you like.)

So yesterday I dug out the pattern and cut out front and back pieces from yellow craft felt. I sewed it together on the machine (the usual technique -- sew right sides together and leave a gap for turning and stuffing; slip-stitch shut). For his eyes I used teal and black buttons rather than the felt they used; I did use felt for his mouth. I "dressed" him in an old sock I had, one of those stripey/fair-isley/deliberately mismatched ones. Because he had no arms, all I had to do was cut the tube off just above the heel to make him a tube dress. The hair was the biggest pain. Their technique was to use a needle and thread to sew through yarn at one inch intervals, making loops, and use the needle and thread to then attach the looped yarn to the top of the head. As always I made things difficult by picking a thin fuzzy yarn that was hard to pierce with the needle. I did get the hair on there eventually, though. I think he's pretty cute:

Someday I'll remember to take pictures while I'm in the middle of a project.

Today I finished a necklace. Over the summer I made a button pendant from Button Ware:

Pink, yellow, and green buttons strung on turquoise craft wire and finished with a glass fire-polished bead. Simple, but it sat on my table for a long time because a silver chain seemed too boring. This morning I realized ribbon would work -- it would add color, provide a bit of texture, and be in keeping with the "sewing notion" theme of using buttons. I found a bit of thin pink satin ribbon and strung it on, and tied on a large lobster claw clasp.

As soon as I find an appropriate charm I'll attach it to the loop at the bottom of the button stack.

Up next -- sewing a fabric organizer to sit under my machine and hold seam ripper, clippers, etc. That's been on the to-do list for years, I picked out fabric for it last year, and I cut out the pattern pieces today. Progress!

Mixed Media Heart Garland

Remember the paper cloth in pinks and reds? Grabbing snippets of time here and there this week I was actually able to make the heart garland I had in mind (based on Perkin's bird garland). The first step was to cut out the hearts using a cookie cutter as the model:
I cut four from the four sheets of paper cloth, to make two hearts each. But because the garland I envisioned was a vertical one, I thought eight hearts would be too long, so I saved the light pink hearts with the pale gold shimmer for another project.

Next, I embroidered them, using Caron Collection Wildflowers thread in African Sunset and dark rose silver-lined seed beads. The red and dark pink hearts I did with feather stitch (my favorite stitch), long stitches with a few beads on them to slide around, and seed stitches with the beads:
For the pink confetti hearts I used star stitches and a line of bead embroidery echoing the yarn embedded in the paper cloth:
For the pink and silver hearts I wanted to use the embroidery to help anchor the candy foil, and my first thought was to do so sort of the way one attaches shisha mirrors, which led to me experimenting with different Hardanger needleweaving techniques:
But the fourth square I did with simple straight stitches, and i liked the primitive patchwork effect so much I undid the rest of the embroidery and redid it:
I think this is my favorite.

The last step was to cut a long piece of fuchsia yarn, sandwich it between two hearts, and sew around the edge with a zigzag stitch. I repeated that for all the hearts, spacing them 5 inches apart, and added a fake metal heart charm and some tiny metal clapper bells to the bottom. Et voila:
I'm quite pleased with it, except 1) I don't care for the look of the zigzag, and will use a straight stitch next time (especially since there is no worry that paper cloth would unravel) and 2) I can't put it up because it is too much of a temptation for the Beadboys to yank. Damn wiener kids.