s-h-o-p-p-i-n-g

Me too. Did some pretty serious retail therapy while, as the British say, abroad.
We are absolutely sequin waste deprived over here and when i saw some at a fantastic notions shop in front of Hags with Bags sculpture i went wild. Sequin waste, at last!
While there i also picked some iridescent sequins and millinery needles just in case.

A block or maybe less, up or down depending where you are walking from, there is an absolutely brilliant bead shop called The Yellow Brick Road . Their web page is nothing compared to what they offer in situ.
i'm not really a bead person but look at the ones at the bottom of the photo. Impossible to resist.

Then i found at one of the malls a heat gun!We're also heat gun deprived here.
Can read your minds- we have excellent produce, food, wines, cheese, climate...we even have computers( grin)
Went for the heat gun with the corresponding plug converter so that i could use it here.

The National Gallery not only houses a superb art collection, but also a great bookshop. Could not resist those two. But that's ok. Books are not shopping, but culture. They don't count.
What really counts is the vainity side in me that had to be gratified. Gowns and shoesies on which i am not going to elaborate. It will suffice to mention that a very stylish jacket-top was made of boiled wool. Plum boiled wool.

So, from now until Christmas i'm all set. End of shopping. FINITO.

neki desu

TAST32-34 crested chain stitch, Portugese stem stitch and scroll stitch

Catching up with TAST. By the way SharonB has moved to here ,guess it was the spam that prompted the move, oi?

Being such a Lusophile silly me thought that i was going to have a ball with the Portuguese stitch, but no the real winner was scroll stitch. i could have done it forever.
i'll get to the Portuguese stem stitch bear with me.

During the holidays we visited the Collin Barracks in Dublin where an impressive decorative arts museum is housed . Oh yes, that's where we were for the holidays, Dublin.

At the Barracks there was an awesome exhibit called The Way We Wear showing great dresses from the 17 hundreds on. Some of the dresses took the term embellish to a new dimension, so richly decorated with embroidery beads and metallic threads they were.
The fabrics alone were worth a whole chapter and the sewing details were intriguing and exquisitely carried out by hand.It was like the cliché phrase- oh that flower's so perfect it looks like plastic! You could clearly see how the industrial revolution changed fashion and workmanship and things have never been the same ever since, well with the exception of Balenciaga and a couple of other divine fools.

Shape and volume were created not only by crinolines and wiring but also by adding different sets of folds, pleats and tucks to the fabric without cutting it.

It wsa a pity not to find tha catalog in the bookshop. But i found a nice little book called Beginer's guide to Mountmellick embroidery. And coincidentally one of the stitches is Portuguese knotted stem stitch. Check out Search Press for this and other needle craft books.

neki desu

more ufos

Another one finished. This is one of paste resist backgrounds and by my standards a big one about 22x25 cms. The ribbon used for framing i could not resist buying. i was willing to make something around it just to buy it, but luckily it fit this project.
Also experimenting here with pigments and soy milk. The fluo pink is part of the batch i bought when in Japan and had been tucked out of sight until recently found.




This is a detail of the stitching and fabric circles. And yes. i'm going through a circle phase.
Coincidentally i'm also weaving circles. Working frantically because i want to finish all i have pending before Japanese class starts.

neki desu