Fair 2017

Ribbons!  It won!  First place and Best of Show!



I love getting ribbons.

Finished!!!

TA DAAA!!!



I had a marathon stitching day yesterday, and finished the last three stacked diamond sections.  At three hours each, that was a lot of stitching. 



Then, even though it was 11:00 pm, I decided to get a start on cutting around the outside edge.  The deadline for Fair entries was looming (5:00 pm today) and even though I had finished the stitching, the looooooong edges were making me nervous.  I figured I could do one or two sides last night as insurance, then finish it off this morning.

Well, once I got going I couldn't stop, and I finished cutting around the whole outside at 2:45 am. I staggered off to bed, and then all I had to do today was wash, press, and attach the clips.



I love it.  I love everything about it.



After the fair, I may revisit the idea of putting in holes for the curtain rod instead of using the clips, and I may put in some more lines of cable stitch or other filler in the plain fabric area (or not).  But for now, I really love it just the way it is.

This curtain took most of half a yard of 32-count Belfast linen (finished size is 42" x 16"), 3.5 balls of #8 perle cotton, and 3.5 balls of #12 perle cotton.  Total stitching time was 348 hours.  The needleweaving in the cut areas took all of the past five weeks, and just that part alone took about 160 hours.  This was an intensive push to finish before the fair, and I have the callus on my finger to prove it; this is where I "bounce" the needle back up as I weave the bars.



This is the biggest hardanger piece I've ever made, and I'm so glad I stuck to it.

Cautiously optimistic...

Eight down, four to go.  Two and a half days left...

Four of twelve

I'm one-third done with the stacked diamonds.



Eight stacks to go, and cutting around the whole edge.

Five and a half days.  It's gonna be tight.

The zigs are zagged

I finished the zigzag section yesterday!



I also did one of the diamond stacks yesterday and two more today, but no picture of that yet because my phone isn't charged and I'm too tired to wait and I'm going to bed.

So close!

I was stitching along this evening, and as I got close to the end of the zigzag I was working on, I thought to myself, "Wow, after I finish this I'll only have three zigzags to go!"

Then I looked at what I actually have left.



I only have two zigzags left!

Somehow, there has been a hiccup in the space-time continuum.  I know that there were four zigzags left when I quit at 11:00 pm last night.  I can't have done two zigzags today, because that would be 12 hours, and there aren't that many non-working, non-sleeping hours in my day.

So there are three possibilities:

1.  Wormhole, time vortex, or other hitherto unknown temporal disturbance with associated memory loss that gave me an entire extra day between yesterday and today.  (Unlikely, but if true I wish I could remember how I did it. Extra days on demand would be awesome.)

2.  I stitched in my sleep last night. (Unlikely. Stitching on this fabric requires a bright light, and that would have woken me up.)

3.  I can't count when I'm tired.

More hardanger curtain progress

I may have seriously underestimated the amount of work left on the curtain.  It's been another week of working on this every day, and I'm only a bit over halfway through the zigzag strip.



It takes about six hours to do one zigzag, and I have six left.  Then the stacked diamonds.  And then cutting around the whole outside to release the curtain.  (Not to be confused with releasing the kraken.)



I have 18 days left until the deadline for Fair entries.  Countdown to 5:00 pm on July 30.  I may not make it.

First row

I'm just rocketing along on the curtain now.



The first section of cutwork is done, in six and a half days. 



My goal was to do one square per day.  Each one takes three and a half hours to cut and weave, so I thought that was a reasonable goal for an evening.  On Saturday, Sunday, and Friday, I was able to do two per day.  That's about another 45 hours in the project total.

Tonight, on to the center zigzag.  I don't know what it's going to look like yet, but I'm sure I'll have fun!

Let the pretty part begin!

I have started cutting and weaving the open spaces on my curtain!



I love this part. It's when the piece really starts to come alive.

Well, that went quicker than expected...

I had a lovely weekend of mostly hardanger-ing.  I'd almost forgotten how wonderful it is to just sit and stitch for hours at a time.



I finished the buttonhole stitch all around the top and sides, PLUS the kloster blocks just inside, PLUS the eyelets in the klosters.

Surprisingly, all that only took three days: Friday late afternoon and evening (buttonhole edge), Saturday afternoon and evening (klosters), and Sunday afternoon and evening (eyelets).  It was probably about 25 hours all together.  I was really not expecting to get all this done in so few days, but once I got going it was just a soothing repetitive motion and I sort of went into autopilot mode, especially on the eyelets. 



I cannot tell you how incredibly satisfying it was stitch the kloster blocks up to the last corner and see that everything lined up exactly perfectly, down to the last thread.  My counting was correct.

The whole time that I was doing the buttonhole edge I debated about whether I would go ahead and do the klosters and eyelets.  Will I, won't I, will I, won't I?  I tried to tell myself that it would take so long, and there would be so many eyelets, and I didn't really want to tackle that many eyelets after I just finished all the eyelets on the stacked diamonds.

Finally I sat my whiny mind down and told it that I shouldn't take shortcuts.  A buttonhole edge backed by klosters and eyelets is the most stable way to finish off an edge.  It just is.  The edge is the part of the piece that takes the most stress, and there's no point putting in all the work on the rest of the curtain if the buttonhole stitches eventually pull out of the edge because they're not properly secured.

I guess I could have just done the buttonhole and waited until after the fair to do the rest, but that's backwards.  It would be harder to do after the excess fabric was cut away from the edge, and more likely to distort.  It just wouldn't be right.

So I did it the right way.



And lest you think that I had a completely slothful weekend, I also did two loads of laundry, hung them out, put them away instead of leaving the pile of clean clothes in the basket, changed my sheets, cleaned my bathroom, cleaned the kitchen, vacuumed, watered and checked all my plants, mowed my lawn, went to the Farmer's Market, and put 12 pounds of local strawberries in the dehydrator.

Progress on the hardanger curtain

Well, my time is ticking away on the countdown to the County Fair, so I need to get this curtain done if I want to enter it this year.  I've made good progress over the past week.



I finally, FINALLY finished all the eyelets in the row of stacked diamonds.  Whew.

All that's left for the embroidery part is to go around the side and top edges with a row of buttonhole stitches (and possibly kloster blocks and eyelets, we'll see how I do on time).



Then, on to the cutting and weaving!  My favorite!

Diamonds everywhere

More good progress on the hardanger- I've finished the kloster blocks for the upper part of the design.



Now I need to do the eyelets for those, and then on to the edging around the sides and top, plus the holes for the curtain rod.  Getting there!

Curtain update

Great progress on the hardanger curtain! I gave one end a quick press to be able to see the design better and evaluate where I am.  I'm designing this as I go along, so I needed to check things out.



I have finished the bottom diamonds, I have finished the middle zigzag.

On to the upper part of the design!

And then... cutting and filling!  The super fun part!

Curtain progress

Still going on the hardanger curtain!  I finished quite a bit over the weekend as I hunkered down during the blizzard.



As you can see, I basted in some temporary guidelines to help with the counting on that upper row of zigzags.  It's all too easy to get a thread or two off when you're working at a distance from the row below, and unless everything lines up perfectly exactly, you're in trouble and just have to pick it out and start over.  In the cut-out areas of hardanger, there is no "almost right."

So the hour and a half it took to put in those basting lines and double check that they followed the exact same thread all the way across the curtain was time well spent.  Now I can do the second row of kloster blocks and the eyelets, with no worries that things will be cattywompus when I get to the cutting-out part.

And just for a reference scale, here's how big the curtain is!  (With a little extra fabric around the edges, of course.)

Remember this?

Way, way back in 2015, I started making hardanger curtains for my bedroom.  I had to go back into my blog archive to see when I last updated this project. It was March 2015, and I had just finished the bottom row of klosters and eyelets.

That was a long time ago.

I worked on it off and on for the rest of 2015, but then abandoned it.  I made a counting mistake and had to pick out a lot of work, and I just got bogged down and frustrated with myself.  Things weren't lining up properly and I kept making mistakes while trying to fix it.  I put it aside with only that bottom row and about half of the matching second row done.

But on December 22, 2016, after nearly a year's break, I picked it up again!  I fixed the mistake (without making more mistakes this time!) and am currently cruising along again. This doesn't look like much progress, but when you consider that the curtain is 46 inches wide, and this is 32-count fabric, each row takes a lo-o-o-o-ng time to finish.

Fair 2016

Hello hello!  The Fair started today!

I entered a few things this year, since I finally finished off some mostly-finished pieces that have been hanging around mocking me.

First up is the blue hardanger square-in-square piece that I designed last year.  I mounted it into a box lid, and it won a blue ribbon and Best of Show!  Yay hooray!!



Next up are the three snowflakes (actually two snowflakes and one eight-sided motif) that I made when I was experimenting with tatting finer threads.  The top and bottom ones are made with #40 thread, and the middle is my own design, made with #100 thread.  I wanted to put all three in the fair but you can only enter one item per class and lot, so I joined them together, put a hanging loop on, and called it a Christmas ornament.



Last up is the green and white edging that I made last year shortly after I re-taught myself to tat.  This has also been sitting in the drawer, just needing the fabric insertion added. So yesterday, at 4:30 pm, I pulled out the sewing machine and an old ripped pillowcase and finished it off.  Fair entries were due by 8:00 pm, but I thought I probably had enough time.  Because I'm not a procrastinator or anything, nope not me.

I traced a circle with a fortuitously-sized drinking glass, ran a narrow line of very close zigzag stitches around the circle with the machine, then hand-sewed satin stitches over that line, catching the inner picots of the tatted edging as I went.

I like the way it came out. This is pretty much exactly as I was envisioning it as I tatted.  The circle isn't perfect and I'll probably clean up that one point on the curve next week when I get it back from the fair, but I really like it.



The thread was my grandmother's, vintage #80 Star tatting thread that's probably 50+ years old. The pillowcase was my mother's, a really old pillowcase that I slept on as a child.  When I went to off to college in 1989 this was one of the two pillowcases that she sent with me, and I continued using it until about four years ago, when it ripped down the middle.  Throw it out?  I think not.  The cotton is so soft and worn and sun-bleached white that it's nearly transparent, and I knew I would eventually use it for something.

Grandma's thread, Mom's fabric, my tatted design.  Everything about this little doily makes me smile.

Ribbons!

I finally got my act together and entered some of my work in the county fair this year, for the first time since I have lived here.



The edelweiss hardanger doily got Judges' Choice! Yay!

The first year of fair-going after I moved here from Friday Harbor was somewhat of a shock.  In Friday Harbor, there is an extremely active textile guild and the fair was the highlight of the year.  The Fiber Arts (knitting, crochet, spinning, weaving, felting/fulling, rug hooking, tatting, etc.) and Textile Arts (sewing, quilting, smocking, embroidery, etc.) entries take up an entire barn, which is one of the biggest display areas of the fair.

Here...not so much.  The entire crochet, embroidery, and knitting display this year was a counter about six feet long and two feet wide.  The quilts are in a different building.  There aren't even weaving or spinning categories at all.

Still, it's fun to have stuff on display and always exciting to win a ribbon!

Eyelets

I had a marathon 4.5-hour eyelet session this evening, and finished all 183 eyelets inside the kloster/buttonhole blocks across the bottom edge of the curtain. 



This puts me at roughly 11 hours of effort on the curtain so far, with one 46-inch "row" of stitching complete.

Curtain progress

Here's some progress on my curtains.  Well, only one curtain so far!



It doesn't look like much yet, but I've got the klosters and buttonhole stitches done across the entire 46-inch bottom edge.

Finished edelweiss doily!

Ta Da!



I'm so happy with the way this came out.  I love the abundance of edelweiss.  After I finished the two rows of five, I agonized about whether to put them on the inner rows of four as well.  I'm glad I did.



This pattern evolved as I went along- I just put in what seemed right.



This was so much fun.