Letting Things Linger...

I love to let things linger.

I love to linger on the beach at the end of a beautiful day until after the sun has set and I begin to grow cold. Only then do I really appreciate the warmth and the beauty of the day.


I love to read very slowly those last fifty pages of a beautiful story when you have speed-read through the first 200. It is a process of saying goodbye to characters and words that you have loved.

This love of lingering can get confused with procrastination. But it is very different.

I have spent the last two days lingering over my Tea Therapy block and my latest book, Mister Pip.


Yesterday, I stretched and steamed the block so that I can "square it up" and I finally stitched the last few seams and attached the last few beads... No, I wasn't quite done when I submitted my photos to that magazine. I still had a few more things to do...


To linger is to be slow in parting from a project that you have loved, re-living the decisions and the lessons learned along the way.


Lingering allows for savoring. It allows me time to make a home for my experiences within my soul so that they become a part of me.


My memory might fail me but the feelings attached to the memory will not.


And so, here is the completed block ready to be sewn together into a pillow. I needed to add to the button trail on the top right so that your eye kept moving from the girl on the top left, through the "band-aid" title and down to the cup. Then, I hope you find the poem, then the three cups and the cake on the bottom left and finally your eyes will rest in the center with the three girls having tea.

Click on block to see larger image.

Hopefully, I was successful and you find yourself looking at all areas of the block and finding new details to explore. I'd love to hear how your tour went and whether it worked or not.

I promise to say goodbye to this block now. You may see it one more time after it gets sewn together and finds it's new home on my living room couch.

Another place my mind is lingering is within the pages of this book.

It was a mesmerizing read. At just over 250 pages, it reads very quickly but it's messages have been staying with me for days. I can understand why this book won so many awards. It's beautifully written, making me want to read more of this author's work. It would make a great book club book paired with Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. Read Dickens first.

So, linger a little, why don't you?

Playing with Chickenscratch

I had a gingham patch on my Tea Therapy block so I decided to play around with Chickenscratch. I have seen examples of chickenscratch around the net over the past several years and always wanted to give a try. I should have used the same thread for the o's as I did for the crosses but that's what experimenting is for, right?

It turns out that I even had an example of chickenscratch in my vintage linens collection and didn't know it.



I love how these simple stitches can transform the whole look of a piece of gingham. The actual gingham on this piece is red and white but all the stitching makes the pillow cover appear a soft pink.

Linda B of Chloe's Place has an entire Flickr set of Chickenscratch examples to delight your eye. I love this one where she applied chickenscratch to a piece of denim...

And I love this little house that she credits to Margaret J in the Quilts of Unity...

Amy of Angry Chicken runs a regular apron challenge called Tie One On whose theme for August is Gingham. Needless to say, there has been much chickenscratch discussion as a result. Aprons are due by September 1 so you can check back on the Tie One On site then to see pics of all the aprons that are entered. There is bound to be a lot of chickenscratch...

Photo courtesy of Angry Chicken

Mary Corbet of Needle 'N' Thread has a post on chickenscratch and Feeling Stitchy also has a good post on chickenscratch as well as many others which I don't have time to mention...Now that I've tried a bit of it, I can see where it would be fun to sit and play around with it for a while.

Here's some good basic instructions if you want to try it. Now don't count your chickens before they scratch...

In Need of Tea Therapy...

I've been so busy sewing away on my Tea Therapy pillow, that I'm in need of some serious therapy right now. But isn't that a good problem to have? Worn out from stitching!!

I shipped off my pics to Cloth Paper Scissors for their Tea Party Challenge. They asked for low-res images...I'm not so sure how a crazy quilted pillow will come across in low-res because it's so hard to see the detail...

I had to include one large picture of the entire piece...


And a picture of only ONE detail. So, I ask you, which of the following three details would you have chosen to send? You can vote in my sidebar to the right.

THE TEA CUP

I crocheted three sugar cubes, glittered them up, stuffed them and appliqued them. The spoon is a vintage sterling spoon pin that bride's-to-be would receive when they registered for their silver pattern.

CUP AND CAKE CLUSTER

TEA FOR THREE

I'll let you know what I actually sent next post.

Making the Perfect Cup...

It's taken me 24 hours to make one cup of tea.

First, I added gold herringbone stitch to my stripes...

Then I couched down a pink silk twist thread...

Added some floral rococo braid...

Edged the cup with pink flower sequins and beads...

Added a purple line beside the pink one to give the line a shadow...
Stitched down some gold beads for extra sparkle...

And finished her up with a bit of glitter "tea" since I now like it so much!

Now, I'm wondering if it was all a bit too much and I didn't know when to stop...

If you missed the post about how I made the cup, it's here.

I like this method of capturing the steps in a project. The first time I did it was for the block for SharonB's class I keep raving about...Because we posted our progress week to week, I ended up with a great slideshow of the block's transformation. Check it out and try it for yourself...

Painting my Cup

As I push myself to finish up the last bits of my Tea Therapy pillow, I'm amazed at how much I still have to do to pull it all together.

Detail Day 13 for 1o0 details in 200 days

It took me a long time to bead and embroider this piece of lace. Some details take a long time, others are super speedy.

By the time I get this far along on a block, I like to wake up first thing in the morning, make a cup of tea, and spend time looking at the block's composition. Then I try to decide what the block needs in order to make it flow...

Well, glaring at me this morning was the bright blue teacup on the bottom right of the block. You can't miss it, right? Way too bright...I want it to stand out but not overwhelm the piece.

So I went to get my Lumiere paints. They're made by Jacquard and I love their shimmer and transparency. They are a delight to work with and I've had much success with them on silk. I tried a couple of designs on a scrap piece of silk and decided on these stripes.

They appear much more opaque in this picture than in real life.

Now, I'm spending WAY too much time decorating this little tea cup with embroidery. Stay tuned tomorrow for an update on how she looks...

A Couple of Details...

Day 9

Day 8

I have stopped stitching my details sequentially since I'm trying to complete my Tea Therapy pillow and not every seam treatment "fits" in the spaces I have left.

I rather like the button flower and intend to add a grouping of them to the project.

I'm heading off to San Francisco this morning for a family vacation and to participate in the Alcatraz Sharkfest Swim next Saturday. I've scheduled a couple of posts while I'm away but I'll return with lots of goodies to share about my exploits! Be well!

A cup of tea

I'm heading off to the Textile Museum in Washington D.C. to demonstrate needlework at their annual Celebration of Textiles. I wanted to have something to take with me to stitch and I couldn't wait to get that tea cup onto my block.


I took my pattern and traced it onto a piece of silk. I then backed it with silk organza and sewed both cup and saucer together on my sewing machine, leaving big spaces on the bottom to turn it inside out.


I then took a small piece of the silk and made a bias strip for the handle and tacked it into place.


I added a bit of ribbon trim and now it's all ready to go with me today to the Museum to get it's stitching embellishment. This should tone it down a bit and integrate it with the rest of the block.

Creativi-Tea

Here is the planning page I used when I was considering doing a tea-themed pillow cover. Using a huge piece of graph paper, I often brainstorm all of the thoughts, pictures and ideas that could potentially be incorporated into my project. At the time, I began creating this tea pillow cover, I was playing with many ways of transferring images onto fabric. Here are some new things I tried:

1. Using Lumiere paints, I used rubber stamps to transfer the three teacup image on the bottom left. I then stitched the middle cup completely to have it stand out.
2. You can't see it very well in the picture, but I also embossed velvet with the words "earl grey" and "english breakfast" using a rubber stamp and an iron.
3. I used a transfer sheet for the little quote and I transferred the little girl sipping tea directly onto silk habotai using my ink jet printer. Both the transfer paper and the silk came from Dharma Trading and I'm very happy with the quality of their stuff.
4. The little tea therapy band aid in the upper right was a mistake at first. It started out as a transfer which I tea-dyed. When I started stitching it to the piece, it started looking like a band-aid to me so I went with that idea and used a micron pen to place all the little dots on it to make it resemble a band-aid even more.
5. I used silk organza to make little tea bags which I plan to fill with special "tea" but now I'm not sure it will fit into this current piece...
6. Lastly, this was the piece that I stitched a lot of my first 100 details in 100 days with Sharon Boggon.

It turns out, I had so many ideas that I decided to make a series of tea-themed pillows...


Just the other day, I was glancing at Cloth Paper Scissors magazine and came across the submission guidelines for their Mixed-Media Tea Party Challenge. I have never submitted anything to a magazine in my life but I am so close to finishing this that I think I could make the submission deadline of July 14 -- so, I think I'm going to go for it. It never hurts to try...

Now it's time to work out the final areas on my block. After taking Sharon Boggon's Encrusted Crazy Quilting course at Joggles, I have a whole different approach to my blocks and their design. That class really changed my stitching life and I highly recommend it if you haven't yet taken it. Now, as I look at my block, I see key areas that I want to stand out and emphasize. These will be the areas that I work on next and develop.

I know for sure that I want this tea cup sitting on the table. I crocheted three little sugar cubes and have a vintage spoon pin to put in the bottom right hand corner on that lace "table"...


Also, I plan to submit pictures of the little teacup nametag I made. It's my cup of inspiration and has a picture of my grandmother on the front and....it's finished!