Matted Kantha Bird

I spent most of the morning trying to figure out why the computer at the store won’t load our new store website. Still haven’t gotten it worked out. This afternoon, I met with Paula at Camas Creek Yarn and we figured out the supplies that need to be packaged up for our felting classes in June. The supplies are going to be included in the class fee but we had designated $15 for supply packs. Luckily that gets you quite a bit of fiber in various forms. Once we got that worked out, I went to Budget Framing to get a piece of matte board for my Kantha bird. They were so nice there and actually just gave me the matte board since it was a small piece.

 And here he is, attached to his matte board and looking happy. Now all I need to do is find a 10″x 10″ square frame. Hopefully, I can find a plain black one in that size. Tomorrow, I’m off to work at Brewfest up on Big Mountain which is a fund raiser for the SNOW Bus. If you’re in the area, it’s a really fun event and you get to drink lots of microbrews from Montana. I never drink any beer but I still have fun.

Finished?

I stitched and stitched on the machine cut back applique piece. Now I have to decide if it is finished. I still think it needs something else but I’m going to leave it for a few days and see what I think then.

I used several different more shades of orange and a few that were pink. Looking at the photo now, it needs more dark lines I think.

Italian Buttonhole Insertion Stitch Revisited

I decided to try another book cover with the Italian insertion stitch binding. Unfortunately, I was in a hurry this morning and forgot to fold over the edges of the binding so I just decided to try it without the folded edge. It actually works fine except now I’m not sure how I will attach pages inside. But I’ll work something out.

Do you ever think that after learning a new stitch, “that was easy, I’ll remember that one”? That was what I thought about Italian insertion stitch but the beginning still looks crappy. Once I got started, it was fine except for a little tension issue where I kept pulling a little tighter and tighter but that’s not really noticeable once it is off the card. But I still always need to look back at instructions to remember how to start a stitch that I haven’t done for a while or that is relatively new to me.

Here’s a closer view once I got going. You can see to the left that the stitches are getting pulled a little tighter because the space between the pages is getting smaller. I just have to remember this next time I do this stitch, that would be good if I had much of a memory left!

The Complete Yurt Handbook

I ordered The Complete Yurt Handbook by Paul King and it came today. I’ve only read a couple of chapters but it has tons of useful information in it. The first section of the book is about the history of yurts or ger and the different types. The second section is complete instructions on making one. So this book will come in really handy over the summer when we build our yurt.

Each of the chapters starts off with a poem about yurts. Here is one of the shorter ones:

In a charming field
Covered with multi-colored flowers,
In the spacious Khanghai land
Rich in green green grass
Floats a fast river
Flooding its banks
And those thousand herds
Graze in their pleasant pasture
There stand silver-white gers
Like pearly hail
Beautifying our Mongol country
As though a shining crystal ray.

Purevyn Khorloo (in Modern Mongolian Poetry 1989)
I am enjoying the book so far and I’ll soon start working on what size pieces of felt I need to make for the walls. I did stitch more on my applique piece but thought you might like a little break as it isn’t progressing very quickly.

Stitching Away

I’m still adding stitching to the machine applique piece. I added more burnt orange and dark purple. It looks a little better but still not as I had envisioned it.

Perhaps I need to add some cable stitch to give a thicker line? What do you think?