Thursday, July 10, 2014

Moving right along, beaded knitting learning and new goldwork design

This is a transition moment, the last of the three beaded knitted doodahs, and  a new goldwork design.




If anyone is interested in owning one of these teeny purses, good for small phones or change, or whatever you think up, I'm planning a little giveaway.  Not today, I  want to finish the latest before I do it.  Just issuing a heads-up here!  

The white yarn is practically antique, from I think the 80s, when did you last  see that kind of wrapper, Orlon?  It's from Karen's stash, in her honor, not great yarn, but just a nice memory of her.  There's more to friendship than natural yarns..and I experimented with different beads, getting different results, a kind of sampler that can be used.

Then last night at stitch in, I had a great time demo'ing the crochet technique of attaching beads to an intrigued audience who'd done beaded knitting the hard way -- endless planning and counting and threading on yarn and feeding up to the needles.  They liked this, thought it much easier and more spontaneous.  

I think in the end it's probably not faster, since the time saved in preparation is probably used up in the actual knitting, since each crocheted bead takes a bit more time than feeding up and knitting the same stitch.

After that I went on to the real purpose of the evening, to draw a new goldwork design, which you see here along with the knitting in progress.  

These wheatsheaf ideas I got from a bunch of instructions from Carol, our goldwork teacher, whose main interest is ecclesiastical embroidery.  Things like wheat and grapes feature in it, but have interesting secular uses too, and here's an adaptation.  I drew it with a fine Pilot Pen.

The original design was of a single stem of wheat, which I repeated once then put in a third, abbreviated, version to populate the space nicely.  The background will be the lovely white linen given by Carol, and I'll use gold threads, yet to be decided which, and I want to use felt to pad them, and satin stitch over or something yet to be decided.  I think I've got my goldwork mojo back.  The knitting helped with the frame of mind.

 

1 comment:

  1. I doubt that you ever have any time to be bored when you have all the different types of projects going on. It's always a surprise to come here wondering what you're working on.

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