Rain! and then chores

Hello, everyone.

I am delighted to say that we got about 2 inches of rain from this last spell. My sweetie went out to pull the dry cornstalks the next day, and the fire ants chewed him up one side and down the other. The ants had not only put their nests in the corn patch, we also found them crawling around on the corn cobs when we went to pick them. Darned ants.

Yesterday we let the chickens have a long walk and sicced them on the ants. Don't know if it helped or not, but it made us feel a little better about the situation.

And last night I bumped my toe--the toe that was really, really purple on the trail, and has lost its old toenail--in the night and it hurt all over again. I'm beginning to wonder if when I dropped the cutting mat edge-on on that foot, I might have broken something. And I'm trying to get it well enough to get out walking again and do some hiking, now that cooler weather is arriving down here.

Speaking of chores, today was our day to add another coat or two of varnish on the doors. (We do it every couple of years, when the weather is the right temperature and not too wet.) The doors always look so pretty right after the varnish has gone one, with the wood all shiny and reflecting the light. The wood lasts a lot longer this way, too.

Progress report on the beading: The completed Delica cross was strung onto a strand with assorted Preciosa beads (black fire-polish, purple oval-ish) and other black and pearly beads to make a necklace. Then, inspired, I made a pair of earrings to go with it. Is it still increasing the simplicity of life if when using up the bead stash I end up having more stuff in the jewelry box?

The second of the Cross of Santiago projects is started, the one made from Preciosa seed beads. The background is black, the main color of the cross is red, and the highlights are blue and gold.

Starting the second cross pendant in the fat part, so the shape changes are all decreases. This was recommended by various beading sites on the web, so I thought it would be something to try out.

The Preciosa seeds act like they're a lot of little ballerinas on point, trying to stand still in a line. They want to angle this way and that way, as the sides don't have a flat part to rest upon. I went with blue and gold for the accent colors this time--have no idea whether the blue and gold are also Preciosa brand, but they're more square in form, so probably not.

I'm of mixed opinion whether to write this off at the top as a lesson learned--forget using these beads for peyote stitch--or hang in there to the end. On one hand, the red and black really make the blue highlights stand out. On the other hand, I'll probably have to back the pendant with something else, like maybe a piece of felt, or it will be too floppy to use. And it's really easy to get the count off with the beads trying to slide out of place.

Another random photo from the Camino:

From Logrono, Our Lady with cherubs. Probably an Assumption statue.

New developments on the Cross of Santiago bead project

Hello, everyone.

I promised that there would be news on the Cross of Santiago bead project--since the last word was "starting over from the beginning."

I did redo the piece. There was an unfortunate excess set of rows that had to be removed just under the cross piece of the cross. That was fixed.

The start of the redoing is sitting in the white-beads dish on the right.

Now the cross bars have been done. You will notice that embellishing color bits are included.

Cross of Santiago, done. The color accents are dark rose and gold.

My plan for this is to use it as a centerpiece of a necklace, using various Preciosa beads I have on hand, and since there is a lot of stash bead stuff in the craft room, there will be some coordinating earrings, too.

Onward and upward with the next project, after this! (The next thing being to sew up some clothes from the mountain of fashion fabrics on hand, and to make a baby quilt for the expected grandchild. Possibly using either a sailing motif or some UT burnt orange--somehow.)

Bead project possibilities

Hello, everyone.

I was crawling around in my computer today--had downloaded a bunch of beading project directions files from Bead and Button magazine's online site--and discovered that I had, after all, saved the bead chart for the adorable cute waymarker at Leon:

Isn't he just the cutest little pilgrim ever? Well, except for any actual child pilgrims, who are by definition cuter than cartoons by far! But after I finish the Cross of Santiago, I think I'll try that one.

The Cross of Santiago, by the way, is almost finished. I did take some progress pictures, and I'll put them all up together. So you can see that every bead project seems to involve at least some "un-beading."

Kind of like sewing, in a way.

And one other picture, just because:

Filling water bottle at the Fountain of Roland, on the Route Napoleon, on the very first day of walking.

This was on the downhill side of the first day, after the border crossing into Spain.

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!