Beads, and starting over again

Hello, everyone.

As you will likely remember, I have some small beading projects lined up to try, along with my idea to make a big picture of the Bramontini Risen Christ. (I think this picture may be 300 or more beads tall, but who knows? I don't think the free pattern makers that cap the width at 100 beads do it justice, and with 100 beads width there are a lot of rows. Not quite 300, but a lot. And the only way I can make a 100 beads wide picture come out decent it to essentially make it a head and shoulders only cropped picture instead of aiming at the whole painting. I'm not convinced the narrative element comes across with only the head and shoulders.)

So I started out with some beads and the pattern of the Cross of Santiago. Goal: pendant for a necklace. Materials: red Preciosa #11 seed beads and bone colored Delica #11 beads.

Starting out on the first attempt on the Cross of Santiago, lower right on the pattern sheet.

The blue bead in the white-beads dish is a stop bead, which I use to keep the beads from escaping out the back end of the thread before they're corralled by the stitches. The squareish bump on the top of the cross is the bail so the cross can hang from a strand of beads or a chain. I will curl it around and sew it into the back of the work at the end, like I did with the scallop shell purse ornament.

I have now learned that you cannot mix the Preciosa seed beads with the Delica seed beads in a peyote stitch project. They aren't the same shape! The Preciosa beeds are, when strung onto the thread, tall and skinny things that don't take up a lot of space. The Delicas are, on the same thread, little rectangles that lock into place in peyote or similar stitch work. When I tried using the Preciosas in the middle of a blob of Delicas, the skinny Preciosas just didn't sit well between the Delicas on either side. After getting about 10 rows up the stem of the cross, I concluded the only way out is to dismantle it--using the line cutters--and redo from the ground up. Using a different set of beads.

Now the tentative plan is to make: 1 cross with all Delicas, the bone colored ones for the background, the cross mostly in a sparkly charcoal gray, and a few accents in dark rose and gold inside the body of the cross and as a couple of little rosettes in the middle of the ground to either side. Then, 1 cross using Preciosas, using black for the background and red for the cross. Maybe a third color as little accents to make the pendant less stark in color. Or maybe just as-is. (A cross pendant in Texas Tech colors?) And finally there is a plan to use Japanese seed beads in transparent red and silver to make a third cross, more sparkly in effect than either of the others I think. Almost Christmas-y!

But that's where this project stands, being redone and turned into three of them.

The Bramontini project, now, that requires me to find or figure out a better pattern that will be big enough, and also I have started putting Delicas on my wish list at Fire Mountain, in colors that the painting will require and I don't have.

My sweetie found a new TV show about surviving

Hello, everyone.

I walked into the living room this evening and found my sweetie watching something I'd never seen before. It's a survival show called, ahem, "Dude You are So Screwed" and it's about some fellow being dropped off in the middle of but-noplace and he has to find his way out with what he is dropped off with. The episode I wandered into the middle of, the man was in the middle of central Iceland someplace. He walked on glaciers, he found hot hydrothermal field springs, and so on and so forth. I found myself remembering the cold, remote-looking parts of the Route Napoleon. (Thank the Lord, though, we didn't walk across any glaciers. With our spring-for-Texas clothes and no fleece in the load at all!) I felt sympathy for him, straggling up hill and down and having trouble keeping his footing in the snow. I remembered the sliding slate rocks on the downhill side of the Cruz de Ferro and how hard it was to find a sure foot place there.

I'm sure a more experienced hiker reading this will be thinking about the sticks. But I found that, after we got past the first day, the sticks didn't help me much. They made me walk slower than I would otherwise. I'm sure that descending the Alto de Perdon would have gone faster without having to find a place for each stickfall along with each footfall.

But this show made me remember all of that. And my sweetie and I remembered together about it. (Who says you have to be staring at the screen just because the TV is on?)

But, on another subject, I have progress to report on the Red Quilt. I have pinned the quilt sandwich together. (Pinning these things is a Buns of Steel moment, as it always involves leaning over while on the knees on the floor. A lot.)

Fist conceptual work: I needed to make a new square or two! and toss out the mostly-white one.

A better assortment of squares. They don't jell yet, though. More work to be done!

The sequence chosen, the index tabs pinned on, and the rows sewn together. Als0, as yo can see, sashing had joined the project.

Oops! The first pieces of batting don't work right. Back to the boxes of stuff upstairs!

The quilt top, sashed and edged, but without the batting and backing in place.

Ready to pin together.

The backing is some yardage of a neat foxgloves type design, blue and yellow bloom stalks alternating in great crowds. And this time, I don't have to piece the backing. I used up almost all of the random pieces of batting on hand for this, and I needed 3/4 of my bag of quilter's safety pins to pin-baste the layers. Next time I go at it, I will take the sewing machine to the dining room--so there is room for the fabric to move--and quilt the layers together. Then I'll add the edging and it will be done.

There is not much progress on the beading, so I won't show pictures of that yet. Suffice to say that I had to locate instructions for how to increase the peyote rows! But by the time I finish this pendant with the Cross of Santiago, I'll have that trick down. For sure. This one is planned to go with a set of graduated red beads to make a necklace. I wear colors that go with red and white a lot, so I can use it a lot. Viva Santiago Apostol!

(Sorry about the lack of an upside down exclamation point there, but I don't know how or if it can be done in this format. Suggestions are welcome.)

I found Pinterest

Hello, everyone.

I found Pinterest. (I know, everyone else has already found it already. But it's new to me.) I started by searching on "beads" and was boggled by all the many, many bead things and patterns. Not much in the way of scallop shells, sadly, but many beautiful things.

Loads of scanned pages from pattern books, too--what's with that? Are they ancient books that are out of print and unavailable? I don't know.

I made a board for interesting projects to maybe try out. And then I discovered that it's not only crafty things that can be made into a board. So, of course! I made a board about Pilgrimage. I used the "show a map" thingie and began locating places on the map that I remembered from our Camino walk. Some of them--astonishingly small ones sometimes--have pictures already uploaded by other people. So I pinned those. Some of the places had no pictures uploaded at all. (I'm not sure I have any to add to the collection on some of them either. Believe it or nor, I didn't make a picture of every single thing we saw or place we stayed.) Ponferrada had several pictures uploaded, but none of the Templar castle or of the albergue. I uploaded my pic of the totem pole sculpture in the garden at the albergue there.

This is the neat sculpture in the garden. In the background you can see the mountains--still snow capped in some places--beneath the beautiful blue sky.

I might have posted this picture before, I don't remember.
They had a couple of pictures of Perejes--which was 1 paved street with maybe 12 houses all told!

An update on beading projects--I have tried a couple of times to make a usable pattern of the neat painting of the Risen Christ but, so far, no luck. I do have some more small things to work on, though, while trying to get a grid overlaid onto the painting image for a big project. There are still the yellow arrow, and the Cross of Santiago, and the blue and yellow scallop from the zero kilometer stone at Fisterra. They'll probably keep me busy for a while! The last one works out to a 2.4 inch wide square and might be something to make into a belt.

Perhaps a still life of olives and wine for a beaded picture? This was in Madrid. 

Possible new bead project

Hello, everyone.

Since completing the scallop-shell purse ornament, I have been casting about for a new project to begin. The photo of the statue of St. James (Major) from one of the churches early-on during the pilgrimage appealed, but the colors just didn't work out. Not enough contrast inside the actual image, I think.

As you can see, the statue itself is a study in browns, with a little gold to accent it. It doesn't translate well to beads.

And I considered the photo of the waymarker at Leon that was so cute:

Absolutely adorable! But the thin lines just don't go well with beads.

So today I was reading the museum catalog for the Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, one of the art museums we went through in Madrid, which has pictures of the art in the collection and comments about the artists and what is in the pictures. I found Bramantino's Risen Christ, which seems graphic enough to work out okay in beads. Assuming that the scan can be enlarged enough to get the job done, anyway.

There are large masses of color, and lots of contrast, and I think it will translate okay to beads. I hope. This is a really neat picture.

All I need to do now is to enlarge it enough so that the finest lines I want to keep are at least 1/10 of an inch across (about 1 bead's width) and then transfer it to the appropriate graph paper. Wish me luck!

It's been a while now, and I still miss the Camino every day

Hello, everyone.

My sweetie asked me if I'm willing to start doing hikes in our local area. We had gotten the book _60 Hikes within 60 Miles_ covering hikes in the San Antonio, Austin, Hill Country area and looked at it. Honestly, a lot of the hikes in this book are shorties--2 to 4 miles. After the Camino, these are just tastes of the thing. But I miss walking, and he misses walking, and we got to thinking, there have to be hikes in our local, Rio Grande Valley, area that we can take. Other than the ones we trained on, that is--Mission Hike and Bike, Santa Ana Wildlife Refuge, and the walk from our home to the "duck park", around the park, and home again--that one's about 3 to 3.5 miles.

There is something about the walking. It seems almost unintellectual--but I think really it's more meditational. You walk, you are zoned out on finding the place for your next step. You stop for coffee (and potty) and then you keep going. And somewhere in that you begin to find a new equilibrium of trust, in God and in your spouse. And in the trail. It's not something that comes to you in your daily round of errands, chores, and going to meet people and do things. Even though, yes, chores can give a taste of the peace as well.

Somewhere along the Camino, after the field of pink poppy plants, my sweetie was taken by the shapes and the shades of the greens.

The walking seems to sort your attitudes out. Things that might have driven you nuts are just there, not even really present to you, because here is the next step you have to take. And later on, you realize that they weren't that important anyway.

Maybe this is the reason why the Pilgrimages were so big in the Middle Ages. And why they're returning to prominence again. We need the peace, and the space, and the time.

If you walk the Camino, take the batteries out of your cell phone. Don't be one of those people who is so busy placating their girlfriends (or fussy parents) on the cell phone while walking that they aren't even in the moment of the walk. How can God speak to you and draw you forward into a better you if you don't even notice His call?

And I do very much encourage you to walk the Camino.

New developments on the framing and hanging

Hello, everyone.

The map of the Camino de Santiago came in the mail. And today I got it out of the tube, laid it on the table under a whole lot of books and CD cases to flatten it and keep the cat from napping on it, and trawled the store room for a frame. We had one! It had a poster of "modern military aircraft" in it, but the child who had it hanging has moved out some time back and the poster was just sitting there, taking up the frame. So I took it out and put the map into the 2 foot by 3 foot frame. Added matboard in back of the map, and also used the cardboard the frame came with and the clips.

This isn't the best picture, and I need to get the hammer out and move one of the nails on the side frames, but here it is:

AD 1445 map of the Camino de Santiago. (Please ignore the flash reflection!)

Also today I made it rain! (Well, unless somebody washed their car, that is.) I hung the clothes out on the line, so of course it rained right after the clothes got dry. And I was not home! But arrived home from the store before it progressed beyond sprinkling, grabbed the clothes on the way into the house, and watched the rain quit falling.

I would have been fine with a good soaking after I took the clothes in, really. The garden is dry and I find that the patience to stand there drizzling a good soak onto each pepper and tomato and eggplant and bean and cucumber and the corn patch just isn't there.

But the pecan trees in back have fruited big time this year, and every time I go outside there are a bunch of nuts on the ground. Only a few of them have been invaded by ants. (I so dislike the ants coming out of the nut in my hand and biting me.)

On another note, I've got the birdies taking an afternoon "constitutional" almost every day, so Mr. Guinea isn't nearly as grumpy to the hens. Especially when I put their morning food out in three distinct, separated piles that each is thick enough to be opaque, so he isn't worried that Mrs. Guinea won't have enough to eat. And I include a scoop of kitty chow in with the layer feed, to increase the protein in their diets.

The other day he found a caterpillar on the ground while I was feeding them. She was happily pecking away at the bird food, and he was picking up the caterpillar and calling her. Over and over. Finally she decided she'd had enough of the Layer Feed and wandered over to see what he was all excited about. He's really devoted to her, but she acts like she goes to sleep wondering why it was her fate that her One True Love is such a jerk and won't let her be friends with the other birdies. Meanwhile, he's very protective of her and concerned that she gets all of any food she likes. And when she goes to lay an egg, he stands nearby and guards her.

If he hadn't killed a couple of cockerels, and wasn't so determined to run the hens off whenever he thinks the food pile is too thin, it would be completely sweet and romantic. Instead it's one of those mixed-bag things. I go from thinking what a sweet mate he is to needing to go into the pen and chase him around so he'll understand that the hens are under my protection. Meanwhile, the Barred Rock hen (Princess Stripey) can't decide if she can hang with the gray guineas or not. Sometime Mr. Guinea lets her, sometimes he chases her away. I guess he isn't sure if Princess Stripey is a guinea or a chicken!

Progress on the Red Quilt

Hello, everyone.

I have made progress on the Red Quilt. The squares are sewn to the sashing strips and connected into rows. Which are back in the "audition space" so I could stand on the piano bench and take a picture of the final layout.

Final layout of the red quilt, with the sashing.

There are still a lot of unchosen squares and strips around--can we say Stash Overload?--and so I'll probably make some more after this is finished.

On another note, my sweetie has declared that it's Beer Season. And his first batch of the year is the Pumpkin Beer recipe from Austin Home Brewers Supply.

Beer fermenting in the carboy, dressed to wow in its protective jacket.

Giving the clean bottles a sanitize cycle in the dishwasher

Capping the filled bottles

Ready to go to the beer fridge and mature until ready

My sweetie says that, since these black lids are the last solid color bag in the house, his next batch will have mixed colors of lids--he's pretty sure there are fifty-plus lids of mixed colors in the bag still.
He really enjoys making the beer. He spends a day mixing and cooking and putting it into the bucket for the first fermentation, then he transfers it to the carboy for the second fermentation, then he bottles and sets in the beer fridge--at carefully chosen temperatures!--to mature. The beer needs to be protected from light, he says, when it's in the glass carboy. That's why I made him a carboy jacket--to keep the light away from the developing brew.