We have a hexagon!

Well...it looks promising, doesn't it?


This is the first of 6 hexagons of flowers! It's done.

There are some things about this that are a pain...turns out that the coral glows under my full spectrum embroidery light when I try to take a photo. I didn't try a flash, I assume it'd be worse. Maybe I can get an outdoor shot tomorrow.



This one looks a bit better, the angle seems to help, and you can see how 3-D these flowers are.



This one is my favorite...well, it's better with leaves, but it's cute! And the petals are all curly.

This is also the one with the truest color. This blue on my monitor is the sky blue of the silk background, as well as the right, bright green, and pink.

This shot of the back of the embroidery shows the part of silk ribbon embroidery that is a pain...you have to sew down all the foolish little tails. It is slow and frustrating, and must be done carefully!



This is the front of that same bit. I later went over the petals to make them bigger and poofier.



Hmmm....I do like how this one turned out, too...with the bright coral flowers, and their dark leaves. I was choosing leaf colors, I had 3 greens, and decided that the neat variegated darker green with brown was just not going to work, and I wasn't going to use it at all. Then after I put leaves on a few flowers, I realized that neither the sedate pale green, nor the bright green was going to work for this flower. I ended up being able to use that green after all!



I like this combo, too...they look sweet together. Ok, I guess I like these flowers. Perhaps that is why I chose this pattern? Of course, the pattern in the magazine bears almost no resemblance to my flowers! I'm totally messing with the colors. The mag had representational colors and names for the flowers. Mine are pure fantasy, although I'm keeping the basic stem shapes and a smidge of petal shapes, mostly for balance. The colors are what I liked at the store, and nothing else!

There are a lot of french knots in this. I can't remember the last time I needed to make a French knot, and the centers of all the flowers have them, and that one flower (was it supposed to be a strawberry? Mine isn't) is just loaded with them!

Well, I got the first batch of flowers done, took about a day and a half, and I have 5 more to do. I'm getting faster, of course, and I'm learning what color goes where, so I won't have to spend quite so much time working that out tomorrow. I have the next batch sketched and labeled, and I even did a bit of stem stitching, so I'm good to start in the morning.

The Boring Set Up

Yay! We are good to go! Well, except for the embroidery thread. I have all the silks, but I need some floss.

I have my frame set, the stand ready.



My cute little caddy. It works perfectly, otherwise I tend to loose my threads. And my clamps. You need clamps for embroidery, don't you? Well, I do. The magazine has the directions for the funkier flowers, which I'll change completely. These flowers will not be realistic. They are Colleen-Flowers! I have pretty colors for them. There is a variegated magenta and pinky lavender and purple. I have solids in lavender, blues, and corals. Then there are some plain and some variegated greens. They all look lovely on the pale blue silk!



Here you can see how I hold the little tote-caddy to the frame.



And the slate frame is clamped to the big stand. You can see the clamp in the back.

Boring, huh? This step of setting up embroidery always takes me forever...and it's very very boring. But, well, you can't do the embroidery without setting it up...so I figure I might as well do it all tonight, because I can't start until I get that thread, and today all the needlework stores are closed. I'd planned to go the floss stitching after I did the silk ribbon, but finally decided I needed to swap the order. So I can't wait to choose colors until I stitch, gotta do it first...so on my way home from meeting the surgeon who will, I hope, get rid of my torn meniscus (oh, my knee HURTS! Complain, fret, whine and groan), I will stop at a needlework store, and then be ready to go.

HAH!

Ok, I did it. I'm pleased. I like my fancy slate frames...they work great. But it is a nuisance to lace them in. Then you have to cut the lacings, reroll the ends, and repeg it, and then relace it. Hate that last step!

Here are the steps:




I made a bit of a template.



I sewed casing strips to the top and bottom of my fabric and marked it from the template.




Sewed the embroidery fabric to the side slate pieces.



Rolled up up and put in the top and bottom sliding frame pieces. Then I stretched them out and pegged it, to make it taught.

This works well, but you really need it stretched vertically as well...which is where one usually laces it, like they did with the Plimoth project, you can see the lacing on the side, here:



Too frustrating, given that I'll be moving it a few times, and I don't want to leave it under tension, because of the 3-D ribbon.



So I threaded dowels through my casings, then used binder clips, tied to string, and hood string clips to hold the strings under tension! It's quick and easy to move those, and tighten them back up!



See? Much easier! I feel clever! Let's see how it works....on to the embroidery!

Tattoo of the kids

There is a bit of shine, and it’s still a bit bloody in this shot (I’ve since given it the soap wash and lube, and it’s wrapped up for it’s first night, as per instructions…..


This tattoo is of my kids...Teddy is the tree, Harry the swing, Beth is the butterfly, and Wendy is the flower.

I absolutely love it. Sharon is the best!!!!! I went to Juli Moon Studios in Lynn, Massachusetts. I highly recommend them, I hope someone here goes and gives them the business, I was so pleased!

Sharon listened to me, drew up what I asked for, tweaked it based on her own taste, keeping in my the things I said (I had lots of things like “well, this or maybe that”, because I wanted the artist to be able to do what worked, without getting bogged down in what I said, since I know that what you say you want isn’t always what you would choose, when you see it for real!). We discussed placement of the butterfly, back and forth, and she ended up with it on the branch, having expected to prefer it flying. I like it there…makes the whole thing less busy and more graceful.

I was on about size and prettiness, so the tree ended up slender and graceful, in a way that it never occurred to me to request. But had I known, I would have. It’s huge, but I was expecting it to be shorter and wider, until she handed me the sketch…and taller and narrower is MUCH more elegant! She’s good…she has lovely taste. Basically, she listened to me, the whole time, and read me accurately. My dd took one look at it, and said when she gets her first tattoo, she WILL go to Sharon! And txted off a photo to her bf, because he wants a tree of life (among other things) and may prefer to go to her, too. And she gave me the whole run down on what is required on safe tattooing (you won’t get anything from her except a tattoo), and how she treats everyone as if they have something nasty, then all are safe. She has a tattoo chair that is sort of like a dentist chair, with two separate leg rests, that are adjustable, back, head rest with a hole in it, the works. Very nice and sensible. She has a water mural painted aroudn the entire room, with a mermaid and fish (some big hand painted ones, and some are colorful decals….great overall effect), the ceiling tiles are sparkly fabric colored, and there are colored glass globes hanging….it’s pretty in there. I loved it. Can you tell? Oh, and it did hurt. A lot. She was encouraging, and suggested when breaks would be good, and patiently let me take them as I needed. The forms included all the info possible, and you had to initial each, including the info that you could stop whenever you wanted to. She was picky about making sure that the stencil placement was just where I wanted it, and offered her opinion as well. We all agreed when it was right. She said she’d MUCH rather I griped AT her than about her, later!





See, my leg is doing fine, here. There is no redness to speak of, yet. This part is very painful...the fine lines hurt the most!



This is the first break, this much took about 40-45 minutes. All the outline is done, the worst part!




After a break...it's over half done. Some color is in.
As time goes by, and more drawing/injecting of ink, my skin got pretty red!






My skin is pretty unhappy, by now! Sharon kept putting on vaseline...she had to wipe off the blood and excess ink, over and over, and you really need the vaseline to protect your skin from those paper towels ;-) But tomorrow the redness will fade a lot, and the colors will start to really shine.




All done!

A square knot undoes...

See the square knot....right over left, left over right (or left over right, right over left...same thing).

Take two adjacent tails and separate them.

Keep pulling.....WHOOPS, you now have two half hitches sliding along a single thread.

Square knots are not good under pressure, if the tail separates from its mate!

Granny bows have this problem, too, but they are even more likely to get into this state.

If you tie a third knot on top of a square knot, or a bow, it will have less of a tendency to come apart. For baby wearing, I tied a square bow (as opposed to a granny bow), and then tied the bow loops into a double bow.

Don't trust a square knot or a granny knot whenever you are wearing something that matters (like a mai tie or wrap). Use a bow on top, or fasten the tails to their mates in some seamanlike manner that will hold (in order for the square knot to fail, the adjacent tails must separate, so there are many hitches that will hold them together, that are easy to take out on purpose, but will not fall apart easily).

A new tallit

I'm working on a tallit for a girl in my Synagogue, whose Bat Mitzvah is approaching. Her dad bought my tallit making services at our fundraising auction...so now it's time.

It's going to be silk ribbon flowers, on a blue silk noile atarah. I'll make the corner reinforcements blue noile, as well. There be a single flower on each corner.

This is the design, from Inspirations Magazine that suggested the design and the flowers to use (well, I'll change them some)

But I don't like the grid...while I played around with my cutouts, I realized that a hex set up, 6 across, worked great! These flowers need to be upright, not scattered, as is my usual pattern...but clusters work!

Here is half of the basic pattern, you can see it inside the drawn lines for the atarah, about 4.5 inches high, 36 inches long.

These are the hexes of flowers. I'm using greens for the stems, not gold, since I'm not doing the grid, and I'll change the colors of the flowers themselves....a lot!

This photo is a bit dark...the blue is slightly lighter, and the corals are a bit lighter and pinker as well. Well, at least that is so on my screen!

I'll transfer the pattern tomorrow! This is going to be fun...I love the colors!

Valerie's Tallit

My niece's Bat Mitzvah went well. Her tallit was finished, pressed, and she seemed to love it...well, given the color, which she chose, that was a given!



Isn't she just adorable? She got the dress in blue, not pink, because the tallit was hot pink, brighter than the photo shows. Good choice!


And here are my older 3 kids, Val, and her brother, all in the tallitot I made for them. Not the best view of my work, but I just love the group of them! They were all delightful, too...Jamie had an aliyah alone, my 3 had an aliyah together, and Wendy chanted.

Now, on the making of the tallit...


I decided that Valerie's had to be the Four Mamas from the Bible, to match the four corners required for a tallit. That was easy, Sarah, Rebecca, Leah, and Rachel. No problem...but I had to find symbols for them all!

Sarah, well, she laughed when God told her that she would have a baby in her old age...so the mouth is Sarah's laughter.

Rebecca...well she favored Jacob. Encouraging sibling rivalry may be what she's famous for, but not what I wanted on the tallit! Several people (on Ravelry and in person) suggested that she was generous, that she watered the camels. Val didn't want camels (too bad...there are some gorgeous camel embroidery patterns in Australian Inspirations magazine!), so I used the blue background for the water.

Leah, Jacob's first wife, had many children, so she is the mother and child symbol.

Rachel, Jacob's beloved, was beautiful, so the eyes are for her.

The gold thread is Kreinik gold metallic thread...not as bad to work with as I was expecting. I found it easier to leave a tail when I started end ended, and use regular sewing thread to tack the tails to the stitching underneath afterwards.

The pink silk noile was a find from my friend Sharon, from one of the online fabric stores...Sharon pointed it out to me, I called Val up and sent her the link, and she was very excited by the prospect. I think it works great for her! It's loud, but it suits her. I planned to use a changeable dark greyish blue taffeta for the water, but it had a nasty crease line in both directions, that just wouldn't work. So the local quilt shop came through with this teal. It's a cotton/silk really soft, slippery blend, but when sprayed with quilter ironing sizing it behaves. Water spots it badly, but evens out once rinsed.



When I was tying the tzittzit, I realized that I had figured out how to do them consistently, so that the spirals started and stopped in exactly the same place, as the instructions require, but never explain how to do. The commercially tied tzittzit don't necessarily get this right, either. So, I took pictures!


Here are the 3 cords plus the longer shamesh.


The cords go through the hole, and the 7 ends get evened up, with the shamesh hanging longer. The shamesh was put through the hole to the inside, so it will always wind up on the bottom, when I'm done with each double knot (granny knot).


The granny knot tied, pretty straight forward so far. But this next bit is the trick: See the shamesh? It's on the bottom half. I ALWAYS "fair up" my knots so that it is in the center of the clump of threads, and pull it towards the front.




Now, as you pass the shamesh around to the left, then behind the stands, you can wind it the prescribed 7 times, and you end with it on top. I keep hold of the strands the whole time, to keep them neat and taught. I toss the shamesh to the left, then reach underneath to grab it and bring it back to the right and top. Divide the strands into two sections, 4 on the right, 3 on the left.



Add the shamesh to the group on the left, holding it towards the center of that group.


After that last double knot, keeping the shamesh towards the center, you start the next spirals.



It takes me 15-20 minutes to tie one corner of tzittzit.


Lastly, I'm not sure why, but I love this shot. You can see Beth's flowers on hers better, anyway.