slowly cooking with saudade

Confession time.
i had concocted my own homemade myths for example among others, crossing ponte Luiz
over to Gaia and frangipanis. This became a recurrent, very Freudian dream in which i was able to grow Frangipanis in my terrace. This was also a criteria i used for establishing whether i could move to a place or not. Lisbon, fine there are frangipanis there, Canary islands no problem. Actually 2 years ago when i was there i went all the way to the boonies to a garden center and bought 2 plants.
The lady at the garden center was very nice. but warned me that this was no go in Barcelona and i smiled and replied to leave that up to me.
Slightly arrogant girl my husband said.

So i schlepped the plants back on the plane looking like a bad case of look who's coming to the city from the farm. And i became dedicated and devoted to the plants
in the meantime producing some artwork using tropical flowers as motif/motive.
They survived their first winter inside the house with plant lights. And this year the bigger one graced me with flowers.

Curious as it is more coincidences, the book that revolutionized my weaving has an exercise using a photo of frangipani.I figured it had to be an extra special book(and it is).
So, no more recurent dreams,it is real. Will have to find more leitmotivs now.
While writing this i'm also cooking for some friends and listening to Mariza and fados, ci mancarebbe altro!

neki desu

rice flour resist update

Did some testing yesterday with rice flour resist. Although difficult to control it gives a nice crackle. Difficult in that:

• harder to see when dry because thin coats dry translucent
• less resistant to water/wetness
• needs a heavier coat or maybe 2 thin ones .

Despite that it's a nice addition to anyone's bag of tricks. The sample above is Pebeo setasilk silk paint on a recycled silk habotai shibori that went off the track.

On to other matters. As far as i'm concerned i need some sort of warm-up when i go to the studio, and blogging and checking the mail simply does not do it for me. Actually they are more of a distraction than anything else. You know, there goes the morning and i'm still at the computer doing one thing or another.

i was delighted this morning when i discovered Practically Creative net
i found a wonderful tutorial that can act as a 10 minute warm up exercise to ease you into studio work.
There's another one that i found useful as an unblocking tool
Both tutorials are useful and fun. What more can one ask for.

neki desu

TAST 29-arrowhead stitch

Arrowhead stitch is fun and one can play endlessly with it.A future challenge would be to create curves and curvy wiggles with it. Elisabeth of Quieter Moments has some wonderful curvy explorations.

i used DMC embroidery cotton, Stef Francis silk noil and Zwicky silk thread that i bought years ago in Lausanne. Strange enough i have not found any web site for them. Also included is a bit of Mokuba narrow grosgrain ribbon and some loosely spun silk .

i'm witing this using Explorer (UGGHH) and not my usual server as half of Barcelona is immersed in chaos due to a mega power failure. We are lucky to have had ours restored a while ago.
And so she dashed to the computer for her fix.

neki desu