Nothing is more fun than giving presents!

A very worthy lady in Aarnimetsä got elevated to the Order of the Laurel last weekend. Vivat! I wanted to make her a present. My package of silks arrived late, so I had only 9 days to make the pouch I was planning to do. I did it in 8 days! Go me! I must have some super powers.

Here are a couple of pictures. Green, orange, black and yellow silk on linen, gold thread (Not real gold, but very similar to it in feel) couched with red silk, glas beads sewn with white silk. The seams are sewn with waxed white linen thread. Stitches: Split stitch, surface couching, laid work. The braids over the seams (I don't know it's name) and the cords were also made with the same silk threads.

My short visit to Aarnimetsä was wonderfull. I met many dear old friends, and made some new dear friends as well. My luggage was delayed in Amsterdam and it must have crawled through northern Europe to get to me, only four hours before I headed home again. Great. At least I got it quickly out of the plane at home. I had to give my two classes without my notes, but they went quite well anyway.

Ja siellä kaikilla oli niin mukavaa...

Proud Mama

I am so proud of my little daughter! She is five years old, and this is the first time that I gave her a piece of fabric, a needle and a thread. She has used a needle before, but only on paper with mixed results. She likes to draw and paint, mainly princesses and pegasi. So, here is what she came up with! Tadah!

She embroidered a pegasos and a cat! The only thing I helped her with was to get more thread and opening a couple of knots. There was no drawing or patterns on the fabric, this is purely free hand. Her next project is a swan surrounded with stars that I drew on a piece of cotton. Embroidery - So easy a child of five can do it!

Renaming the Brown Silk

Here is the first sleeve embroidered. I hereby rename "The Brown Silk" as "The Gold Garb".

I embroidered all the flowers in all of the pieces first, because I'm not sure if I have time to embroider everything in time. Now I do the sleeves first and assemble the garb before embroidering the rest. The garb will not look too incomplete if I do the embroidery symmetricaly. I might not use this at Aarnimetsä Academy though, because I would like to reserve the wow-factor to when it is all done.

Oh. How long will this take? If I work hard and don't do much else, I can embroider a sleeve in two to two and a half days. That means that I'll be doing some embroidery for a long time, even though I know I'm fast.