Spray of Urchins

The sea urchins have been placed...

Nestled amongst some seaweed found...

Getting cozy with the skeletons of sea-worn shells...

And be-friending a family of barnacles that have quite an attachment to a pretty scallop...

Their attempt to take some of the spotlight away from their nine-armed neighbor has begun...

Sea you next time...

Thoughts on Random Stitching

Hello everyone, it sure feels good to be back in the embroidery saddle again.

I hadn't intended to disappear for a week but life conspired to take me elsewhere.

When last we left the shell project, I was leaving to stitch "sand" onto my piece...



Subsequent to that announcement, I received this comment from fellow BNF (blogging needle friend), Rachel Wright of VirtuoSew Adventures:

Random scatters are the hardest of all effects to achieve, but at the same time...you don't need to encrust the piece completely to create the illusion of a sandy beach

As we emailed back and forth, she added this bit of wisdom:

Random is hard because we are so good at pattern-spotting and pattern-making...

This really got me thinking.

Having attempted to stitch randomly a few times before, I often found myself unintentionally choosing a similar sequence of beads or evenly spacing bead clusters...filling spaces...the overall effect being anything but random.

My solution to combat my own mind, was to take a handful of "sand" bead mixture and toss the beads onto the piece, letting them all fall where they may.  I took a picture of this random scatter and used it as a "pattern" for my stitching the beads in place.

Over and over again, as I stitched this piece, I found myself falling back into a habit of selecting a certain sequence of beads or wanting to evenly space the beads out.  It was very helpful to refer to the picture as a guide to break me from my natural tendencies.

Even with the help of the random photo, I'm afraid that my final product is not as "random" as I'd like to believe.  I kept adding things that weren't in the picture and changing some selections.

Shame on me.  End result is nice but I think I have to do a better job of sticking to the original plan.

Rachel was right.  Random is hard.  Much harder than it looks.

Regardless, I thought this whole lesson in randomness was a good thing. Thank you Rachel for sharing your insight ~ it was a great help.

Happy day everyone; I'm off to stitch another sea urchin...

Hot. Hot. Hot.

It's been a busy week away from home. My SIL and her two children are visiting this week from Texas. Yesterday, we rented bikes to tour the monuments in Washington D.C.

Honestly, it's a wonderful way to visit all the monuments and all the museums.  But yesterday?  A heat wave has hit the East Coast so it was about 105ºF (41ºC)!!

To say it was hot was an understatement.   The kids were tough and powered through.

This is Cate.

She was a good sport in humoring her Aunt Susan by taking this picture.  Unfortunately, I couldn't see the screen in the sun to line up her finger correctly, so I missed it.   But her face was so cute that I have to share it anyway.

Unfortunately, the Mall was all torn up while they re-furbish the lawn and...the reflecting pool is still empty and therefore, not reflectng...



You can see Jim in the picture guarding the bikes while the rest of us went up to visit the Lincoln Memorial.

This is Travis riding under the Cherry trees in the Tidal Basin.

He was a complete trooper and hardly made a peep about the ungodly heat.

And even though the reflecting pool wasn't reflecting, the Tidal Basin was...



But my favorite part of that most very hot day was our stop at the Jefferson Memorial.  It's open to the elements so for what little breeze there was, we felt it there.   It was quiet there.

A time to sit and reflect and think.  It's a serene place to visit...not as crowded especially on this hot day because it's a bit of trek to get there from the main Mall.    A bike makes it much easier.

And my favorite shot was this one of Jack.

He must have sat for 10 minutes against that column, taking in the words of Jefferson... 

And considering the dome above....

He's a thinker, that Jack.  

Finally he got up and came over to me to tell me that because there were not carvings in the center of the dome, there was no depth perception either.  You couldn't tell if the center dome was 5 ft deep or 20 ft deep.  And did I notice the spiral design that resulted from the decreasing diagonals of the squares?  (You can't really see those too well in the picture but I hadn't noticed them until he said something.)  So THAT was what he was thinking...

I love this age.  So many neurons are firing.  And he's absorbing information at lightning speed and drawing his own conclusions.  We're having some really thought-provoking conversations these days...it sure is keeping us on our toes...

I should be back to stitching tomorrow.  Have a great weekend!