Should you wish to listen to this blog post, please press HERE So now you have the basics of sewing a little book under your belt... it is time to talk about paper. Hopefully you followed my suggestion of cutting different sorts of paper - and perhaps you noticed that sometimes a piece of paper cuts, or folds, more easily in one direction than the other. This is because paper has a 'grain' (rather like wood). I don't want to disappear down the very large rabbit hole that is paper-making, but it is useful to know that whatever base material is used for making paper - wood-pulp, plant fibres, mulberry bark, cotton or indeed old paper - it is broken down to its basic fibres and mixed with a lot of water to make a slurry, which then finds its way onto some sort of fine mesh. The way the fibres are aligned in the paper-making process produces the grain. One direction will always be easier to fold on a piece of paper than another. That is called folding along,...
An audio clip will appear HERE in due course... I am always amazed at just how much crochet I churn out. I suppose it IS my main occupation now, but there are quite long stretches where things just 'progress' towards completion: Work In Progress, or WIPs as they seem to be known. Well, of late, several projects seem to have come together in quite quick succession:- In the wake of my Ocean Waves wrap came a scarf using the same pattern and yarn, but in a slightly different way: On the tail of that was probably my favourite so far - a pineapple shawl worked in hand-dyed alpaca-and-silk yarn, to a pattern by my guru Fiber Spider on YouTube. It's 6 ft by 3 ft 6" and thus this photo really only shows half... The upper photo shows the blocking process, where one dampens the shawl and stretches it out to open up the lace-work. As you can see, an awful lot of pins are involved, but the end product IS worth it. It's one of those patterns that seems ini...
For some reason, I did not post this back in May... so here it is, 'better late than never' !! To bring you up-to-date on a few things: THE BANYAN progresses, albeit slowly. There's an awful lot of just plain old sewing of long, straight seams. Perfectly enjoyable, but not really 'newsworthy! The second photo shows the neck of the lining being re-inforced, prior to stitching it into the outer layer. Exciting stuff... but I have a few more straight seams to sew before I can move on to that... Then I have been developing my latest crochet pattern, called Treble Triangles, which is now slowly taking shape as a wrap... Oh... and on top on all that... I have just taken up the tenor Viola da gamba! When I left school, forty-five-odd years ago, it had been my intention to learn the gamba as my second study when I went to college to study singing. Of course life is never quite that straightforward and I ended up at Guildhall - where second study was, automatically, piano :-(...
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