Just little things

Hello, everyone.

I'm afraid I don't have a lot to talk about today. We took all three dogs to the vet (at the same time!) The dogs survived the experience. They rode very sedately in the back seat on the way home, without sticking their noses out the window or jumping around. (Wow!)

I've been looking around for another peyote idea to bead, but nothing really strikes me just now.

I did do some more work on the Red Quilt. (So named from its dominant color.) The Red Quilt is a baby sized quilt, with 4 squared across and 5 down. I'm adding sashing in a navy solid, with little white-print cornerstones. The last picture I have of the Red Quilt was during the auditioning phase:

One of the auditions of squares for the Red Quilt

I think some of the squares may have moved around a bit since then. I did add navy blue sashing--which is being attached to the squares now--and I'll also put navy blue for a border next to the squares. Probably that will be it, except for the binding. Usually in this size of quilt I use satin blanket binding. (When I was a baby I liked satin a lot. Still do, in fact!)

But that's really all I have to talk about today. Maybe tomorrow I'll show y'all pictures of Beer Making Season.

Bead project finished

Hello, everyone.

Today I finished the beaded shell project.

Y'all probably remember the last picture of it:

Peyote stitch shell project, at end of weaving stage

You can see that the shell seems to be placed too far down in the blue background. I decided to add a fringe to balance the colors. Looking online led me to this article about beaded fringe that seemed to be the right kind of a thing. Using a pad of graph paper, and basing the structure off of the fringe in that article, I counted the number of strands at the bottom edge, separating the "up" beads from the"down" beads, and drew a pattern for the strands.

Each tiny square of the paper was one bead, marked B for blue, W for white, R for blush ("reddish"), F for fringe, etc. It seemed hard to read, so a line of light orange at the color changes was added before beginning. The hanging crosses are an inspiration from the miniature  wall tapestries we saw in Istanbul souvenir shops. Many of them were icons and had a collection of crosses and eye beads hanging from the bottom.

The pattern for the fringe, with the completed bead thingie.

Happily, the fringe pattern uses up more of the Delicas that are in the basic shape, plus some enameled crosses, perles, hearts, and Delica fringe-beads that are in the stash.

After finishing the fringe, I held the project up in front of a mirror and discovered that this is just way too big to make a necklace out of. I supposed that if I'd been thinking of it and drawn it differently, it could have been a bracelet. Maybe the next one will be! But this isn't a bracelet either. So...I laid it on my purse and had a look at the proportions. It fits!

Completed purse ornament.

I used some more of my favorite thread, Fireline, to attach it to the purse with a pair of 6mm blue glass catseye beads for the transition at the top.

Fireline 6 lb test line and Rappala line cutter. You cannot use normal scissors to cut this stuff! You will ruin the edge on your blades. Go to the sporting goods section and get fishing-line cutters instead. Mine are from Wal-Mart.

Friday fish dinner

Hello, everyone.

You may remember my gushing over the St. John's Day sardines in Fisterra.

We came home determined not to let the wonderful new foods fade from our memory. You will recall the post about making Pulpo.

Today we had sardines. Our grocery store, HEB, has been stocking little bags of frozen, fat sardines. They're not quite as fat and wonderful as the St. John's Day sardines--but the nice man at the fishing museum in Fisterra told us that the sardines start out very fat at St. John's Day and get, well, leaner and drier as the season progresses. I presume that all the frozen sardines we see were caught in the middle of the prime sardine season.

We eat the sardines with fresh baguette bread--that being basically equivalent to the barra breads we were buying in Spain.
The recipe for preparing the sardines, from my end, is really simple: thaw bag of sardines. Hand over to Sweetie. (He grills them over charcoal.) Serve with slices of baguette, sea salt, extra-virgin olive oil, and a nice white wine. No extras required. Fight off the pets who are crawling into your lap trying to get some!

The sardines (these were fresh, not frozen, but still...) we ate in Fisterra. With bread chunks and a nice albarino wine. 

And my sweetie was very proud of having caught me in a picture with the sign "pirata."

Eggs, eggs...Christmas!

Hello, everyone.

The picture of one of the decorated eggs reminded me--I think I have pictures of more eggs.

You see, I used to have pet ducks. And more chickens. Plus I had elementary aged kids in the house. So once in a while we'd have Christmas in July--decoration making.

The kids would paint eggshells, I'd paint eggshells. And I also used a Dremel--my sweetie's Dremel at first!--to cut an opening in the eggshell to use it for a scenic egg. My grandmother's friend used to make those, and hers were beautiful. Mrs. Beckley, I think her name was. She sent me an eggshell once, when I was young. I still have it. It's a scenic egg with an angel inside it. Pearls around the opening, too.

Here are a couple of eggshell pictures.

At the lower right, three eggshells with scenic decorations attached to make an ornament, with a tassel. There is bead netting around the edges of the shells.

Mom gave me some ostrich eggshells. One had a crack--the cut gave me this partial shell for a scene. I put a Nativity in it, perched on top of brown satin. This one is heavy, I have to find a fat branch to hang it from!

I thought I had pictures of the eggshell ornaments with paintings of blossoms and suchlike, but apparently I didn't get that. Yet.

Christmas is coming. (Bwah ha ha ha!) I'll try and remember to take pictures of the eggshells then. Who knows, maybe I'll have time to blow out some guinea eggs and decorate them!

A surprise in the henhouse

Hello, everyone.

As I think y'all might remember, we have a few pet birds. Just now, "a few" means 3 hens and a pair of guinea fowl. (Mr. Guinea and Mrs. Guinea, who live alongside Ms. Silver, Ms. Red, and Princess Stripey.) Today, as we have been for the last several days, I let them out about 6 pm for a walk.

The walks in the evening let them get away from each other for a little while, let them eat bugs and seeds in the yard, and let them not notice me getting into the henhouse for the eggs.

When I opened the "people door" and went inside the henhouse, I found the usual two green eggs

Ameraucana egg. (Tastes just like the brown and white ones!) For size, the tiles are 4 inches square.

and an unexpected three guinea eggs. Mrs. Guinea must have been hiding them under the straw, because yesterday my sweetie looked for eggs and didn't see any of the small, brown, speckled looking guinea eggs.

You have to be cautious about collecting the guinea eggs. The hen is very attached to them. And her mate is very attached to her happiness! A few days ago, after collecting eggs, I was sitting outside watching the birds at their activities when the guineas went back over to the pen. Mrs. Guinea went first, calling "Good luck! Good luck!" as she went. Mr. Guinea trailed after and made little screeches. She went inside the house and looked for her egg (now collected) and came out hollering her head off. "BUCK WHEAT!" (There are multiple ways to write down the call. She had definitely gone from concerned to screaming upset.) Mr. Guinea, hearing his lady yelling that "it's GONE!!!!" commenced to giving out his alarm call, too. It was all very traumatic for them.

But if I allowed her to collect a clutch and set, her mate would make the three hens' lives a living hell. He already chases them around when he thinks there isn't enough food for his lady, or that she's wanting peace and quiet to lay an egg. Imagine what he'd be like if she was setting all the time on a clutch of eggs? It would be simply impossible. And so I collect her egg every time she lays one, just like I do with the hens.

I have boiled the guinea eggs, and after you get the shell to open up and peel it off, they make perfect deviled eggs. If weighed to get the amounts to match up, they are fine for baking with, too. And they make good fried eggs, though there is about half the amount of goodness in a guinea egg compared to a large chicken egg.

Another thing you can do with eggs--after you blow out the goodness inside the shell!

Just a few thoughts

Hello, everyone.

I will have an update on the shell beading project soon--have scanned the interwebs and discovered ways to do fringe. Also, expanding on the fringe for the Autumn Leaf amulet pouch on a web site (slips my memory just now) I have sketched a design for the fringe at the bottom of this square pendant with a scallop shell. Bonus points: I can use some of the blue enameled crosses that I have lying around in my (large) bead stash.

And one more thing--
When my sweetie and I first felt the pull of the Camino de Santiago, we didn't know what it would be like. What it would involve. And the depth of the roots that is would grow into our souls. Every day I think about the Camino--what it was like. What I wish I'd done a bit differently. What I'd do now if we were doing it again. (Not quite the same as the previous.) What routes I'd like to walk if we are so blessed as to go again.

Not only do I miss the good foods we discovered in Spain--ham cones! Pulpo a gallega with pan! Gambon al ajillo with pan! etc. etc.--but I have begun to make my own baguette bread so we can eat some of the wonderful foods we ate one the Camino, and during the days at the end when we were exploring and waiting for the date of our return reservation home. (No, I'm not recreating the airport food from the 1 day flight series that turned into a 3 day flight series.)

And periodically, like a growing crystal that is discovered by a gem hunter, I find a new lesson that the Camino has taught me.

It's not only the urge to have shells everywhere. The urge to create jewelry of shells and Crosses of Santiago. The every-morning feeling that it's time to walk, even before the alarm goes off.

The Camino de Santiago takes root in a pilgrim. I'm still a pilgrim. I don't think I'll ever stop being a pilgrim. And that itself is probably one of the lessons of the Camino.

Just after the stairs at the entry to the city of Santiago, studying the map of the city. I never felt sorry for the bicycle pilgrims until tha tlast day, when I witnessed them toting their bikes down the stairs alongside us. But at the bottom, they got to ride again. We walked the couple-three miles from those stairs to the center of the city on our feet.

This was another of the approximately 2200 pictures we took on our pilgrimage trip. :-) Enjoy.

Update on the Camino themed bead project

Hello, everyone.

Today I think I'll update y'all on the progress on the bead project.

I think I had posted a couple of early-stage pictures of it--which will reappear in this post.

I wanted to design a scallop shell bead project, a woven picture really, using peyote stitch. And I had the free beading-design graph paper from Fire Mountain to use. So I sat down and used my pencil to make a sketch. Actually, three sketches, but two have not been started. The one I tackled first is the scallop shell.

The scallop shell is possibly the oldest symbol of the Camino de Santiago (Jakobsweg in German) (Way of St. James in English, at least before everybody started just using the Spanish name.)
The medieval pilgrims would travel to Santiago, and sometimes also another week to the coast, and they'd pick up a scallop shell as a souvenir. They'd proudly display their shell on the return trip.

These days, pilgrims get their shell when they start out, and then after they arrive, they use more modern, more convenient transportation to go home again. A few walk the reverse trip--we saw them. I had a lot of trouble understanding why they'd do it. But they'd pass us, going the other way, with their backpacks, probably not even one percent of the number going west to Santiago.

I don't remember if they still display a shell as they go the reverse direction.

At any rate, I was inspired to make a peyote-stitch shell.

The early stages:
This was just the, um, tag at the top of the shell.

At this point I'd begun the shaping of the body of the shell. (In the background, you can see the arrow and the Cross of Santiago on the graph paper sheet as well.)

Now the shape and the shadows of the channels begin to show up.

At this point, the shell is done. You can see that the angles of the channels don't quite match the angle of the beads as they lie. But it is still a scallop shell.

I plan to fold over the top part to make a tube, and then make it the centerpiece of a necklace.

Maybe I'll expand the concept next time, after making a Cross of Santiago, and place the Cross of Santiago on the center of the shell. That was a common way to place the two items in souvenirs that we saw in Santiago. It's the way my pin is made, too.

I still don't know what I'll do with the arrow after I figure out how to make that. Possibly I could hang it from the base of the shell? Or maybe just have it be a separate piece altogether.

For the curious, the beads used in this are Delicas, from Japan. They have very regular sizes and a really nice, big center hole that the needle can go through again and again.