Needle Lace Talk

I've just joined another Ning group, this time about another of my passions at the moment, needlelace. I was searching my files for a photo of an ATC I made for Susan Lenz's exhibition Cyber Fiber in South Carolina. I put my one and only completed sample of Aemelia Ars style needlelace on it and sent it to her in exchange for one of her own. Must have deleted that photo, or I've filed it somewhere strange. So I had to pop over to her blog scroll down to find my ATC and save it again. So here it is, a well travelled ATC not looking too shabby for my first attempt and a real tribute to the teaching skills of Margaret Stephens my fabulous tutor. I used olive coloured swarovski crystals, gold beads and gold tiny sequins to add some bling to the card too.

New Blog template

Decided I needed a little renovation so chose a new template and played with some colours - hope you like the result. Sometimes a change is as good as a holiday, especially on a nasty wet and cold day, LOL. However, I seem to have lost my "about me" description, drat. One day I'll learn to leave things alone !!

It's raining cats and dogs !!!

Australia surely is a land of contrasts, as Dorothea MacKellar said in her poem "My Country"
I love a suburnt country,
a land of sweeping plains,
of ragged mountain ranges,
of droughts, and flooding rains

Well, I think the flooding rains have definitely arrived on the New South Wales coast in the last fortnight. I think it's rained every day, and often ALL day. As a result I had to decide today whether to brave public transport in the cold and rain to go grocery shopping, or wait till someone is home to drive me to the shopping centre. I chose the latter, and raided the "emergency" supply of pasta meals for my lunch. I had a hot shower, put on tracky dacs (that's slang for loose track pants and sweater) and put on the gas heater in the family room. Here's Bob (the female studio cat) taking full advantage of the heater to warm her tummy, she lays like this for ages, LOL.



Here's a frontal view of Bob outside last year with her friend Blackie Puss. BP was a stray cat we sort of adopted, and he was a whole male who used to fight off all the neighbourhood cats to protect Bob. Sadly, we had to take him to the Vet for some treatment for an abcess and discovered he had Feline AIDS. This would have meant keeping him inside at night and a lifetime (albeit shorter) of meds. Bob has her own medical problems which make her very anti-social at times so unfortunately we had to make the painful decision to have BP euthanased. He really was a lovely old black and white puss and I miss him being around.



The wild weather on the east coast of Australia has even seen a mini tornado hit Lennox Head, a beach side town up towards the Queensland border. It's been declared a natural disaster zone and will take weeks to get cleaned up and back to normal. Thankfully no-one lost their life although some people were injured by flying debris and many had very lucky escapes.

TAST 2010 week 11 and week 2

I've been quite keen to try a few more "catch up" sessions this past fortnight, so here are my week 11 attempts at Bullion buttonhole stitch. I should confess that the first 2 attempts were ripped out, I think there is a trick to putting just the right number of wraps on the needle for the size of the stitch and this took me a while to master. I like the sample with the beads which looks like a row of flowers. The middle example has some glass facetted beads on the bottom of each bullion which I put on before going to the next stitch in the row.




Next is week 2, Diamond Stitch.




I got a bit confused with Sharon's diagrams here, but once I realised that the work had to be turned 90 degrees and the stitch worked down the line, I grasped it. The second sample is worked one stitch at right angles to another and so on, then the beads sewn in the spaces made. A useful stitch to have if large areas needed to be filled but still left a little open, if you know what I mean, LOL.