11.19.08
Posted in Beading, Artwork, General at 7:00 am by deRomilly
I’m putting some of my jewelry up on Etsy.
Right now there are only a few of my id/flash drive lanyards, but I’m hoping to add several bead-embroidery brooches and goldwork pendants soon. Textiles are, after all, my forte. I feel a little silly that my first foray back into business has been strung beadwork when it really isn’t what I’m known for!
But within a week Golden Circle Designs will be back up and legal. This weekend I’m going to layout all the existing designs into a current publishing program. And I’m still playing with website design. I’d REALLY like people to be able to download the designs in pdf form immediately after payment. But I’m thinking that might not be workable right now. So I’m still doing research…
In any case! Etsy! http://RomiPaws.etsy.com
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11.17.08
Posted in Finished Projects, Stitching Genres, "Freestyle" embroidery at 8:00 am by deRomilly
This is a post for Mary Corbet, who posted this summer about the Inspirations camels, and for whom I promised to search for the photos. I was lucky enough to find them.
I’ve read Inspirations Magazine constantly for the past many years — I didn’t realize just how many until I pulled up these photos and found I’d stitched them in 2004! Now I really feel old! I’ve been reading the magazine for a long time before that, too…
Usually I read the projects and get inspired and go off and do my own thing. But when the camels found their way into my hands, I was happily ensconced in my bellydance troupe and looking for a way to thank them all for the wonderful times they’d given me. These were perfect!
I stitched them individually on small pieces of Weeks Dye works hand dyed wool felt for each of the troupe members. This let me try out the stitches and experiment with the specialty threads on the blankets — since I couldn’t get many of the Austrailian threads in the states at that time - and didn’t have the money to order them all at once.
The wool flannel blanketing for the blanket came from Jenny June before the owner folded the business (I’m still bummed about that closure…let me go pout in a corner for a while). I got the last yard she had of the blanketing. There is still enough for me to stitch the camel sequel for me (Inspirations # 43), but I haven’t gotten around to it.
If you have access to this magazine, sadly no longer easily available, I highly recommend this project! It’s quick and fun, and absolutely stunning in person. As usual, click the photos to enlarge them. I still see the camel on black every week at a friend’s when I go to rehearsal with my new troupe, Phoenix Rising (which shares two of our old members in addition to me) and I’m still honored that it hangs on her entryway wall.
Closeups of the blanket camels:
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11.12.08
Posted in Drawing, Artwork, "Freestyle" embroidery at 7:00 pm by deRomilly
My mother doodled all the time. — she made little geometric designs on napkins, scratch paper, letters… once she even doodled in ballpoint pen all the way around my father’s good drafting tape (on the EDGES, not the main part — she ruined the whole roll) I took the heat for that one - mom wasn’t home when he found it and “she knew better,” so I was obviously lying. Well, yes, she did, but it didn’t stop her. and I didn’t, at that time, doodle at all.
Why not? Doodling was hard for me. I’d ask Mom or friends how they did it, “Just turn off your brain and move your pen” was the answer. But I couldn’t seem to achieve both of those things at the same time, although I am perfectly capable of doing either at once (and I’m capable of turning off my brain and dancing!). What I realized much later is that the “turning off your brain part isn’t really necessary - what they really meant was “make your brain get out of the way for a while.”
Doodling, like rough drafts of writing, requires you to turn off the inner critic that says to you “but you’re not accomplishing anything. That’s not REALLY art!”
Well, no, it’s not. It’s the building blocks of the practice of art, however. Think of it as a brainstorming activity - it doesn’t have to be pretty, it doesn’t have to be finished, it just has to BE.
Geometric Doodling
I have a few rules I set myself when I doodle geometrically. They were very effective in getting me started on geometric doodling.
Start with a small iconographic image in one corner. I use flags, flowerpots, a smiley face, hearts, a stylized cat, anything I can quickly churn out.- Draw a diagonal line from that image across the page in some way.
- Add a ribbon over the middle of the page. The image is sacred, but I’ll cross any other lines with the ribbon.
- Start filling in spaces with random patterns. I played roleplaying games for years, so sometimes I’ll role a polyhedral die to decide what to put where. Things I often use, set up for rolling two six sided die are (when you roll a number, fill the space with the description:
- 2 Wavy lines or wavy stripes
- 3 Dots
- 4 Large cowspots (blobs)
- 5 Concentric outlines
- 6 Lines radiating from any point
- 7 Checker Board grid
- 8 Stripes
- 9 Spirals
- 10 Checkerboard made from radiating lines
- 11
Crescents
- 12 Cross hatching
- Repeat the last step until all the spaces are filled or you are bored out of your mind. (Or it looks cool to you and you want to stop!)
Organic Doodling
These are the first doodles I taught myself to do in high school.
-
Take your pencil and draw a squiggle. It actually works better if you don’t actually look at the page while you’re scribbling.
- Open your eyes and look at what you have scrawled. Stare at it until you see something in it — like looking for cloud shapes in the sky.
- Darken the outline of whatever you see. Instant (sort of) doodle!
- Or, draw your squiggle large and use the list of geometric fillers to fill in the spaces.
- Expand your horizons and try different combinations when doodling. Pretty soon you will be doodling with the best of them! And sometimes, those doodles can inspire embroidery!
Doodles that are currently inspiring embroidery pieces, though they aren’t on fabric yet:
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10.14.08
Posted in Crewel, Stitching Genres at 7:59 pm by deRomilly
I love crewel. I love the designs. I love using multiple stitches, and I love the feel of the yarn moving through linen twill. I don’t, however, love the current trend of the big design companies to print their designs on evenweave (tabby) fabric. It makes it really difficult to make edges smooth, as they must be to look correctly. And the fact that the fabric is usually 28 count or lower doesn’t help, either. Next thing you know they’ll be printing them on aida.
I’m currently sorting threads from a kit like this. Sometimes I wonder if I’m just masochistic, but I really liked the design! And it fit in my budget… I may hate it by the time it’s stitched.
As with many things, you get what you pay for, and the nice kits with quality supplies are going to cost you. Many of these are imported from Britain as well, which also raises the price point. So I suppose that the lesson I am trying to teach myself is that no matter how much I like a design, it just isn’t worth it if the materials are second rate: I should have saved my pennies and bought my coveted Jacobean Lace pillow design in a month or two, rather than succumbing to immediate whim driven by a sale to buy the inexpensive one. Not that it will keep me from stitching it, but I’ll probably whine a lot while I do.
And yes, this does mean that I have bought cross stitch kits for thirty dollars and then gone out and spent the same amount on linen to replace the aida to stitch them on. And I think the result was well worth it, too! 
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09.05.08
Posted in Samplers, Stitching Genres, Lace at 7:30 am by deRomilly
I got a bee in my bonnet to try to learn something new wieth my stitching recently. I’ve had a shelf full of needlelace books for years now, and every once in a while have pulled them out, failed miserably, and put them away again. I’ve been the same way with actual band samplers. I’m afraid I’m not really cut out for working my samples in a sane manner where they’re easy to retrieve. They always seem to work better when done on any old scrap of fabric I happen to have to hand at the moment.
Currently my band sampler is only about a foot and a half long. It looks like this, having some herringbone where I started doing TAST last year before I dropped out awfully quickly, and some buttonhole stitch…
This time I decided that since I’ve been doing stumpwork successfully for some time now, I should be able to do needlelace, too. I started a wired flower in cloth stitch (corded buttonhole) a month ago and had a bit of success - I still need to get green silk so I can do leaves, but it’s destined to be a brooch, and I’m really proud of the stitching. 
Photos soon, I hope.
So I pulled out my band sampler, and I’ve been doing all the boring gruntwork of learning many variations of needleace stitches - ripping out and restarting over and over until I get the hang of them. I’ve got several sizes of thread going here, and that is teaching me a lot about how sizes work as well. I think most of my problems in the past have been related to using too large a stitch for the size thread I was using.
This is fun! I’m liking the lace patterns that are emerging, and I finally think I’ve gotten a handle on tension. And I’ve got ideas out of my ears for designs and steps to go with this. Of course, that’s always part of my problem — too many ideas to actually manufacture the art! (and several of them integrate that wonderful bead stash from my last post!)
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08.28.08
Posted in Beading, General at 2:01 pm by deRomilly
I had a bitersweet time last week - one of my favorite bead stores went out of business. They are demolishing the shopping center where it was located, and the owners decided that it just wasn’t feasible to move. I’m losing the opportunity to learn dichroic glassmaking and lampworking locally with a studio that could be rented. The owner is keeping her artist studio, however, and we’ll still be able to get her beautiful art glass.
My loss is also my gain, however, because they had a 75% off sale where my husband encouraged me to spend some of my business capital. $65.00 later and I had almost $200.00 worth of beads in my possession. Hee hee.
Here are some of the results, all destined to turn into SOMETHING. Several of the pieces already have design ideas brewing… Click to embiggen.
Stash one, two and three. This is only a partial view. You don’t want to be looking at supplies forever! Yes, Stash three is being overseen by the “kitten” of the house, three year old Dora. I still can’t believe she’s already three. She thought the stone chip strands were there just for her to play with. And pose with.
Closeups of a few of my favorites. The cab bead (it’s drilled, oddly) in the first photo has a hankering to go into a needlelace necklace. I’m still playing with ideas for the shape of the lace. The two donuts with skrimshaw kitties I have NO idea what they’re going to be, but they are sure cute! The glass beads I just fell in love with. The red ones are very smooth and have a very deco feel to them with the grey and black swaths through them. And the blue… well, I just love blue vintage beads!
And Pookah made an appearance, too… This is Dora’s mother. And a full pound and a half smaller than her daughter! Pookah should maybe have been named Pixie, she’s so small.
I can hardly wait to play with these, but for now they are going to have to go into the storage bins, because even though I’ve got ideas, I’ve also got things that have to be done first. Durn it.
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08.11.08
Posted in Stitching Genres, Lace at 3:37 pm by deRomilly
I just discovered this form recently — there was a post asking about the book by Elena Dickson on the h-needlework list. I was so intrigued that I bought it sight unseen and without any real reviews.
All I can say is wow - it’s beautiful! And faster than a lot of needlelace, unless you mess up. Errors have to be fixed by carefully cutin gout the offending area and beginning the knotting again.
I’ve been playing with larger threads than she recommends - both becuase I thought they’d be easier to learn on (they were, for me) and because I saw a potential to use this as an alternative to crochet for hip scarves and other bellydance embellishment (I’ve also been playing with macrame for this purpose, more on that later!)
I like the effect, and may make myself a hipscarf using this technique. One of the advantages I can see immediately is that if a thread breaks I wouldn’t lose an entire row of beads and coins, the way I do on the purchased, crocheted scarves.
And since I try to go through all the stitching on the purchased scarves myself because of that ravelling tendency, starting from scratch with this technique doesn’t sound quite so bad right now, although time is always an issue!
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08.04.08
Posted in Samplers, Historical at 3:02 pm by deRomilly
Now I am not a sampler historian. Until I discovered 17th and 18th century samplers I didnt’ care for them much at all, actually. I hate stitching words in cross stitch or backstitch, and just can’t wrap my head around the little pastoral houses with oversized dogs and cats in the yard. I dislike the “primitive” style intensely on a personal level. I loved Thea Dueck and Just Nan’s samplers, but couldn’t see myself hanging them on the wall once I’d finished stitching them. What to do, what to do?
Then I discovered the historic band sampler and the spot motif sampler, and all the ones in between that combine the best of both worlds and kajillions of different stitches. I was hooked. Basically what this, combined with osme of my other tendencies underscores, is that if it happened before 1800 I’m much more likely to be interested in it. <grin>
Samplers and the motifs you find on them have a bit ofa torrid affair with historians. Just about everyone who gets involved with studying them wants to know the history and meaning of each individual motif.
I fear this has become a bit of a game. You find cats defined as quick-witted, but also as lazy. When I put a cat into my work, I’m much more likely to be thinking of my furry baby at home than about some deep symbolic meaning of the motif. (English majors do the symbology thing too… even though Poe has written countless letters stating that “The Bells” was nothing more than an excercise in rhythm and rhyme, the English departments all insist we dig out whatever meaning we can from it.) As my heart-sister says, “Sometimes a cat in a flowerpot is just a cat in a flowerpot.”
That said, there ARE some overarching archetypes. However, these are often nationality, or even region-specific. We see crowns in the samplers of monarchists families under Cromwell. Some German samplers have coats of arms or crests related to their region of origin that crop up. Dutch samplers often have stylized tulips.
I think rather than symbolic, most sampler motifs are either regional or just something the stitcher liked. The historical pattern books like Scholyker’s Scholehouse for the Needle don’t assign meanings to each little design. Many of the symbols developed out of older symbology, especially in Eastern Europe.
But although people have loved including secret messages in their lives (language of flowers, language of fans, symbols in samplers), even if a meaning was intended we would need to be using the same dictionary as the maker to interpret it correctly. There are as many Victorian dictionaries of flower meanings as there are flowers, all different. And, as different meanings for motifs crop up almost daily — finding the one true dictionary seems to me to be so close to impossible that it becomes irrelevant.
So I’ll continue to stitch historic samplers, but I’ll also continue to design my own. Find what symbology in them as you will: I’m not putting it there intentionally!
Other links of interest:
And that should probably keep you busy for a while!
I’d love to hear your views on samplers and sampler motifs…
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07.28.08
Posted in Counted work, General at 12:57 pm by deRomilly
I apparently disappeared for much longer than expected! It’s been a busy month, but I haven’t been idle on the art front, either.
As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been taking Sharon Boggon’s class on Studio Journals — something I signed up for at the last minute, after months of waffling about it. Knowing it was something I could use, but not really thinking through the time commitment. The result - with typical summer busy-ness, a deadline at the day job (that slipped at the last moment, durn them), and prep work for a dance class (that ended up cancelled after all for lack of students, grrr, apparently I’m not the only busy one this summer!), I haven’t done as many of the excercises provided for class as I’d hoped, and I haven’t blogged, either.
Part of the reason I haven’t gotten as much done in class as I’d like is a good result - the class has spurred me to actually WORK! My studio journal is bulging, both wiht the few class excercises I’ve managed to churn out - usually one or two a week - and ideas for “real” work.
I’ve finished the design work on two small spot samplers (8 X 10 inches ea), and a huge one, inspired by this post (she had a followup here) at Inside number twenty - I’ve started one of the small ones, and have the full yard of linen on order now for the big one and the humongous thing will fall to my needle as soon as it arrives. Maybe I ought to stock up on block DMC.
The little one, “Esther”:
The biiiiig one! As yet unnamed, and unstarted. Ideas?
And that leads me to a question. I’m still notiating my way around the business license process in my “new” state. How many people do you think would purchase cross stitch patterns via Etsy? Some other site? Or should I wait until the license has gone through and go ahead without a middle man from day one? Which would you rather I did?
I have to admit, it’s very nice to be back in the design game. The past 8 years have given me some real challenges with my health and family to overcome, and I’ve felt that I’ve ben neglecting an important part ofme. Between actually dancing (and teaching) again and designing/art-making, I really am beginning to feel whole again.
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06.14.08
Posted in Free Patterns, Counted work at 4:30 pm by deRomilly
Of mice and Romis.
It took me longer than expected to get to the computer to convert patterns for you. But I’ve got one! OK, so I’ve got two. These are from a very large sampler I’m designing. Wish me luck, ’cause when it’s finished I’ve got to actually STITCH the thing!
Have fun with them. If you use them, let me know how!
Standard copyright notice applies. Feel free to use for personal use only, please don’t sell the design or mass-produce stuff from it. If you want to use them commercially, please ask and we’ll talk. If you link to it, please link to the entire post, not just to the chart.
Click to enbiggen. Note: the first one prints better than it displays, at least on my monitor.
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Right now there are only a few of my id/flash drive lanyards, but I’m hoping to add several bead-embroidery brooches and goldwork pendants soon. Textiles are, after all, my forte. I feel a little silly that my first foray back into business has been strung beadwork when it really isn’t what I’m known for!
But within a week Golden Circle Designs will be back up and legal. This weekend I’m going to layout all the existing designs into a current publishing program. And I’m still playing with website design. I’d REALLY like people to be able to download the designs in pdf form immediately after payment. But I’m thinking that might not be workable right now. So I’m still doing research…
