Infinitely Dense

One of my favorite diversions is Brown Sharpie, a webcomic full of math-wit drawn by Courtney Gibbons with, you guessed it, a brown sharpie*. Three times a week, I find myself thinking, “Now that would make a great embroidery to nerdify my home.” (Yes, nerdifying my home is a goal of mine.) Yesterday, I finally set out to make one of these embroideries. I chose this Bananananana… Bread comic from February, because isn’t that perfect for a tea towel?

Unfortunately, I had a difficult time transferring the image to this natural linen, despite using the sunniest window in the house as a light-source. I ended up freehanding the text and the result is… well, you can see how bad that text looks. Rather than ripping it out, I’m just going to get some white linen and re-do the whole thing. Maybe I’ll do this one next.

Thanks, Courtney, for giving me permission to copy your work and share it here!

* Well, it’s now a brown-sharpie-like tool in whichever drawing program she uses with her pen-tablet.

 

Another one bites the dust!

Woohoo! I’m on a roll. Two down and only two more to go.

This one is for my niece, Zoe. These fabrics are from a charm pack and I’ve already forgotten the name of the collection. (I know, I’m bad.) I just love the raindrops and the salmon and the hidden squirrels so much! The embriodery is free-handed, basically just doodles that I liked. Of course, none of it is straight, but that’s the beauty of handmade. So, I actually began this quilt, oh, last summer? Why yes, I am the princess of Procrastination. It is going in the mail tomorrow, so I’m hoping that my bro and sis-in-law don’t read my blog (or at least that they’ll feign surprise when they recieve the gift).

Productivity is the word of the week around here and as I finish projects, I am itching to add more to my list. My next sewing project will be the mod-sampler quilt that I mentioned in my last post. As for knitting, I’m actually completing one full pair of socks(!), only because I broke down and started knitting two socks at a time using very long circs and the magic loop method. They’re taking longer to complete, but I won’t have to worry about my chronic single-sock-syndrome. After that, I’m dreaming about doing my first sweater, prompted by the release of Spring ‘09 Knitty. I have eyes on the Pioneer top as my first sweater and the Aeolian shawl (times two and sewn into a rectangle) for a chuppah*. Sigh, so much to do, so much to do…

* Before you go getting your hopes up, I am not in want of a chuppah in the immediate future, but I do intend to knit it, which will take forever. I should probably get started if I want to get married before I’m thirty.

 

Jewish Embroidery

The most common searches that bring visitors to my blog are about Jewish embroidery. This makes me feel a little bit guilty, because I don’t actually have much in the way of Jewish embroidery.  I’ve mentioned a few projects here, but nothing more. So, I thought that I would be useful and post an embroidery (or appliqué or heck coloring page). The part where I got to play with my newfound toy, Inkscape, was just an added bonus. (I *heart* Inkscape!)

Download the pdf: MagenDavidHearts

 

Thursday

My whole life, I’ve enjoyed garage sales. I can’t say the same about thrift stores as there was a time when I very much resented my mother dragging me around thrift stores in search of clothes. Garage sales are different. They are personal. It’s akin to rummaging through your friend’s medicine cabinet during a dinner party. It’s an opportunity to peak into the life of the sellers that you would else never have. Estate sales are the best; wandering through somebody’s house, room to room, and able to rummage through all the drawers. It’s like a sociological treasure hunt.

Last weekend, we just went to a few garage sales, but one was particularly fulfilling. When we drove up, the first thing I noticed were books. They had boxes and boxes of books. Sometimes you think you’ve found a gem like that and they end up being all romance novels or something, but these were good books. It was as if they had tailored the selection to my tastes: classics, cookbooks, science, even a few math books! I came away with a nice selection and Boy got to laugh at me and my fetish.

             

Sorting through everything they had to offer, I was thinking about how easily we could be friends with these people, despite the decades that surely lie between us and them. Just when it couldn’t get any better, I found a table of textiles hidden inside the garage from the ill-foreboding skies. One of the women tending the sale explained that all of the textiles  had a story behind them, were bought during various adventures. A lot had been picked through, but when I saw this, I fell in love. This fabric was from Africa, country unknown, hand embroidered in swirling stitches of vibrant greens, pinks, oranges, and black, and quilted. It’s bunched up, by design or mishap, I don’t know, but I like it that way.

It’s approximately 36″x48″ and surprisingly matches our green (hand me down) sofas. Someday, it will hang on the wall, but I haven’t yet decided how best to go about that. Oh, we payed $3 for it.

And the summer full of garage sales has just begun.

 

Wednesday Works In Progress

My boyfriend is always chiding me about my ever growing list of things to do. Sometimes he gets brave and tries to stand between me and a new item for the list. It’s cute really, though it rarely works. How thoughtful he is that he doesn’t want my to-do list to become overwhelming, or perhaps he’s just tired of having one finished curtain hanging in our front window, while the other four lie in wait in my box of sewing projects.

Of course, at the moment, I have too many wip’s and not enough fo’s, which doesn’t particularly make great fodder for the blogging cannon (a wip in itself). Nonetheless, I’ve decided that Wednesday will become Works In Progress day in hopes that it will help keep, or revive, my interest in projects lost to the box of doom. Here it goes:

I recently stumbled upon this blog, Judaica Journal, and it had me wondering why I don’t do more Jewish crafts. So I promptly began this hamsa embroidery to be mounted on some wall in our home sometime in the future:

A hamsa is a traditional symbol amongst both Jews and Arabs. It sometimes represents the hand of God and is used as a protecting talisman. Also, because it is something that Jews and Arabs share in common, it has become a symbol for peace in the Middle East. The text is the first lines of an important Jewish prayer, the Shema, in gold cotton. The design will be several shades of blue and mostly free form.

Number deux on the to-do list is to finish painting and recovering the new dining chairs, that we got for free from Craigslist. When my boyfriend first moved into the apartment, we bought the coolest table from Ikea, but skimped on the chairs. For several months we were using a combination of wood folding chairs and cheap balsa-like wood chairs that came with a table (my current desk) from Target (all for $19.99, so you can imagine the quality). So we’re very happy to have new comfy chairs, or will be, at least, once they become fo’s.

They came to us a lovely reddish brown covered with creamy fleur de lis fabric and complementary stains. They are otherwise in wonderful shape. So, we bought some darker brown paint and will be using our older curtains to cover them. All in all, we’ve spent approximately $15 on a set of four dining chairs. The chairs that I was eying to buy were at the very least $50 a pop (and I probably still would have recovered them), so we saved about $185. Pretty darned good, I think. Now, if I would just finish this and the curtains, our living/dining area would look completely different.

Thus concludes Wednesday Works In Progress #1. It’s time to go sit by the pool with some lemonade.