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Wednesday 19 January 2011

Stitching projects online

The international temari community is slowly returning from hibernation. Everyone seems so busy in the months leading up to Christmas that many can't commit to new projects etc near the holidays. 2011 is beginning with a new project on TC and TK.

Let's talk about the TC one first. An election was called for new projects for the group to work on for the start of 2011. The clear winner was a Flower sampler (one for each month - fits perfectly on a C10!) with 28% of the votes. I think I voted for Multi-centers marking, Thread Challenge and Character temari - geisha, samurai, emperor, empress etc.

I've almost finished wrapping my ball for the flower sampler and it is a whopping 50cm circumference, I've used a muted green for the surface wrap. The next job is exploring the flowers to use, there are a few schools of thought on this, some people are using the flowers of the month (seasonal or birthday) and others have suggested using the state flowers (such as of USA). Now I'm an Australian so using the state flowers from America (beautiful as they are) doesn't seem too patriotic so I started to investigate some of our native flowers.


Images from http://goaustralia.about.com/od/discoveraustralia/ig/Floral-Emblems-Australia/
 The top flower is the Australian Golden Wattle and is our national flower.
The second row has the Australian Capital Territory flower the royal bluebell and the Waratah from New South Wales.
The third row shows the Sturt's desert rose of the Northern Territory and Cooktown orchid from Queensland.

The fourth row features Sturt's desert pea floral emblem of South Australia and Tasmanian blue gum,
The last row features the Common heath from Victoria and the red and green kangaroo paw which is Western Australia's floral emblem.


So the result of that is maybe I need another idea because there aren't enough flowers to fill a C10 and I wouldn't want to stitch any of these twice anyway even if I could work out how to stitch them. I decided if I wanted to stitch Australian flowers I'd need to look beyond the floral emblems so back to the internet I went.

Of the 100's of images available of Australian Native flowers these are the only ones I liked the look of.


Images from http://www.anbg.gov.au/gallery/colour.html
 And some of these flowers I really only liked the common name such as the top right image which is called Eggs & Bacon Pea... how classic! I think my most favourite of these images is the top left one which is the NSW Christmas bush. I am sure I could translate this flower onto a temari... given enough time!

So I need to ponder this a bit more.... Or I might go another way and just do flowers I like no matter where they come from.


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Next is the project from TK. It is a S8 spindle based stitch along which is being presented by text, no diagrams. I did well with the first 2 steps but the wheels fell off at step 3, I can't follow the directions at all, and I think the problem is I can't imagine stitching a hexagon over 8 lines. I read the instructions several times over the morning, again after I'd eaten a healthy lunch and once more after a few squares of chocolate but they still don't make sense to me. I know the answer is obvious... I usually get tripped up by the most obvious things, so I guess I'll just wait until a progress photo is uploaded in a few days. In the mean time I'm going to finish wrapping my big green ball for the TC project.

3 comments:

  1. Rebecca, you don't stitch on the extra guidelines for the hexagon, you just skip right over it, only stitching on the guidelines that already have the spindles on them. It is not an even hexagon, it is elongated.
    Jane

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  2. Aha! I was fixated on it being a hexagon (assuming it would be all nice and even) now I'll go back and re-read the instructions. Thanks Jane, you're awesome!

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  3. Rebecca, I thought the same as you!!! I'm so visual, instructions are good but without pictures I'm easily lost.
    Best,
    Laura B

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