Progress

Working my fastest in hopes of finishing the smaller pieces by Pentecost.  Daytime is for gardening and cleaning and cooking and all that fun stuff;  way too late into the night is for stitching.  I've listened my way through several Brit-cop shows, and last night delved into "Destination Truth"- you never have to look up much for that, since you KNOW they're never going to find the creature.  Whoever invented the "go-somewhere-find-nothing-tangible" genre of "reality" is a GENIUS.

  Anyway, here's the center design of the aers (chalice veil), now for the borders!

Syncronicity? Serendipity? Something!

   This past Sunday was Palm Sunday for the Orthodox.  It is a joyful feast, the end of Lent and the beginning of Holy Week,  and the liturgical color is green.
    And so I saw Father Michael's "green" vestments for the first time -

  And here is the half-completed center section of the altar cloth-

How cool is that? Pentecost is going to be a very well-coordinated Holy Feast!

  The rest of Holy Week is a rush of services- an average Holy Week is 30+ hours in church.  Then there are 50 days until Pentecost.  There is no way in the world to finish the altar cloth in that time (next year!) but I'm thinking if I switch gears to the aers and chalice covers...

A Milestone - sorta

  Well, after about 125 hours of stitching (and now into my 4th British Cop series on Netflix) I have almost finished the 1st half of the center panel of the altar cloth.  Lookit -

   The ground fabric looks pink because of my work light...  I am truly pleased with how this is looking so far.
   Now on to the NEXT 125 hours.  And the 125 after that.  And the 125 after THAT....

50 hours

  About 50 hours of stitching into the center panel of the altar cloth (this bit will finish out at 39" x 39", BTW).  This photo doesn't show the color well, but it's the best I could manage past midnight with a little yaller kitten trying to grab the camera (she likes the whirring noise it makes).

     And speaking of little yaller kittens, she posed for us on my new bandana - she must be a Deadhead at heart!

Aaaand We're Off!

     After a few days of staring in terror at nearly $300 in linen,  measured a dozen times and MADE...THAT...FIRST...CUT (I suffer from Fear of Shears.  Takes me forever to get up the courage to make- that- first- cut!)  and got the first piece basted to the scroll rods, and the center and edges of the first section (altarcloth center panel)were counted and marked.
    The Giant Skeins Of Silk are on the way (a good two weeks sooner than expected!  Thank you, Nordic Needle!) and meanwhile, I have a couple of small skeins of each thread.  Time to start the fun stuff!
    First evening, about 3 hours work -with some occasional distractions from "Wire In The Blood"-  produced the outline of the altarcloth's center cross -

   Evening two, four a total of a little more than 8 hours stitching (and another 3 episodes of Wire in the Blood!) and the center is taking shape-

  No silver added here yet,still thinking about its best use in this section - you can design til your eyeballs fall out,  the actual threads and fabric ALWAYS looks a little different than that pattern graph!
  And now for the required-by-the-internet kitty content!  Butterbean and Tortellini have been released into the general population with the rest of the Clowder, and are making themselves right at home-

   

The Giant,Huge, I've-Lost-My-Mind Project, or how Liadain spent the rest of her life....

    Okay, y'all.  Nothing exceeds like excess,  right?  So somehow, when it was mentioned that it would be lovely to have a beautiful new altar cloth for our beautiful old new church for the Feast of Pentecost,  Auntie Liadain lost her mind and popped up and said "Oh, I can do that, I have just the idea!"

  And you know what, I DO.  Been wanting to work something from this design for years, and could never grasp the "thread" of translating it to blackwork - until I offered to make it for the church.  I began with this -

an illustration from the 1896  l'Arte de Crietien de Egypte - Motifs de Broderie Copte",  by Therese de Dillmont (DMC).  (you can download these books in PDF at Antique Pattern Library - enjoy!).  As you can see, this is a pattern for a needleweaving/pattern-darning technique.   Took some fiddling and experimentation to see exactly how to translate this into the squares of counted blackwork, but once I got a grip on the center section and one of the leaves, I had it and we were off to the races.







         My first "translation" was pretty literal (except the bunny.  The bunny wasn't quite the thing.)

The PDF chart for this can be downloaded on the Free Stuff page at Practical Blackwork -
Pentecost One chart  (scroll down to"freebies from the management)
  As you can see, it's pretty close to the original,with the addition of center and border crosses.








    Of course Auntie Liadain can never leave well enough alone. Looking at other illustrations in the book,I saw other elements I liked, and I worked them into a larger version.

 

The chart for this can ALSO be downloaded at Practical Blackwork - Pentecost Two Chart (again, scroll down!)
   











    This is looking pretty good, right?  So I enbiggened it to fit the size of the altar (39" square) which translated to 1 stitch on the chart = 3 stitches on fabric.   This would call for really REALLY wide evenweave linen.  The widest and best I found was25-count round yard linen  from Hedgehog Handworks, which is beautiful beautiful touchy-feely sumptuous stuff (and ON SALE through February, y'all!).

          This made really big empty spaces, of course, which called for fillings,and then I rethought the drape of the shape-  Eastern Orthodox churches have lots of candles, and censors full of burning coals, and all sorts of stuff going on.  A closer fit would be better,and so I "uncornered" the design-

  (Sorry, kids, no chart for THIS one!)   - and Behold,  I decided I had designed this design about as designedly as it could get, and I backed slowly away from the pencils.  Until, ofcourse, I remembered there were more pieces needed -

  the aers- (never sure exactly how to spell that,
but it's a piece used in the Great Entrance/
 preparation of the Eucharist)

                  

              and the chalice covers (need 2 of these).
               Okay.  NOW I am done designing.          






    Pentecost is also the Festival of First Fruits, and green is the color.  I won't bore you with the details of choosing the right threads for this project - let's just say that I now have a HUGE stash of assorted green silks, cottons, and linen threads! - but I finally decided on materials from the Caron Collection - for all outlines, "Impressions" (50/50 silk/wool) in emerald variegated,  for fillings "Waterlilies" (stranded silk) also in emerald variegated.  There will be silver threads for accent, and most likely some sort of silver trim/ fringe/galloon/something to finish the whole thing off -here's very bad shot of the color test that decided the issue-

      
   Hoping my progress pictures will show the color better, but the variegated threads add a great deal of depth without my poor old brain having to choose a shade of green for every single leaf.
   And there you have it, the rest of the story of what I've been doing these last few months.  Next up will be Getting Brave Enough To Cut The Linen!

Long Time No Me!

Life's gotten away from me lately...

  Himself had rotator cuff surgery this past summer, and we had 2 - count 'em, 2! - orphan kittens.  One, about 3 weeks old, Himself found out in the pasture amongst the horses' feet, squalling...

  The second, who might JUST have been a week old, I found apparently dead in a puddle after a rainstorm.  When I picked it up to dispose of it, I discovered it was - barely - alive.

  I revived her in hot water and by carrying her around in the front of my shirt.  Discovered later that she was apparently covered in something bad - I broke out in hives everywhere she had touched, and her poor little eyes were horrible.  A trip to the vet and many horrible eye medicines later, one cornea was scarred beyond saving but she has the vision of the other eye.  

   Both Butterbean - the little yellow one - and Tortellini - her older calico "sister" - are Big Girls now, and learning to stay out from under the dogs' feet and get along in the general population.

   

                         Meanwhile, we got a new priest, and bought a new church-

the oldest continually in-use church building in town, built in 1916.

 We (the congregation) then renovated from this -

to this - and it's still a loving work-in-progress.  

  And now it's January, Himself has a new job, and I have a huge new project - but that's for the next post!

Making Over

 Sometimes, a perfectly good dress just ain't RIGHT, you know what I mean? Some while back I made THIS dress-  from Simplicity # 2615, and absolutelt hated the fit - no matter what I tried, the cut made me look fatter than I already am.




   So recently I got McCall's #M6520, and "rebuilt" view "A" to suit me - graded to fit, raised the neckline about 2 inches all around, added an a-line skirt instead of the shirt-tail, and got Ugly Brown Dress out of the back of the closet.




  I started by cutting off the skirt according to my new pattern, opened one seam, and set that aside for the moment.  The bodice from the Simplicity pattern was cut in two pieces, a right and a left, so I ripped the seams and used these two large pieces to cut the raglan sleeves and the pockets for the new dress.  Bodice front and back were cut from some whole cloth I had stashed (I ALWAYS buy at least a year too much), and the sash was set aside for further consideration.


   After an afternoon of sewing, I had THIS dress - all finished save the sleeves, which I was considering.  Reuse the lace from the first dress?  Stick with the Farmwife Feedsack plainness already going and let the pretty red buttons be the decoration? 




  Finally decided on cuffs, and discovered that the sash from the "old" dress was the perfect size for repurposing.   And so, for a dress I would never ever wear, we have a perfect "everyday" dress,  very comfy and cool for the summer!  




   In all, the changes I made to the "boughten" pattern were -
(1) grading to fit.  I wear a 36 in store-bought clothes, but always have to grade purchased patterns up at least 2 sizes.
(2) Swapped the "shirttail" for an a-line skirt.
(3) Raised the neckline 2" on every piece - WAY too much exposure for everyday!!
(4) changed the pockets to "patch", since the skirt was already sewn.
(5) plain waistline seam - the pattern calls for a drawstring.


  And that's another for the wardrobe!