 I have been working in my garden this week, cleaning it up and getting it ready for my sister and a couple of friends that I had invited over for afternoon tea.
We have had some lovely rain in the last couple of nights and the garden is looking lovely, unfortunatly the rain also meant that it was overcast and to cold to be outside so we ended up having an indoor teaparty, around my studio table…I say we because my neice and her friend came over early and to help, they arranged the food on the plates, helped make the egg sandwichs and set the table…they also helped me cook Lemonade Scones which we did at the last minute so that we could eat them hot and they all got eaten before I thought to take a photo.
Holiday Snaps Day 8
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A this seam will also be under the the bow I have chosen another neutral stitch…Zig-Zag Chain stitch with only a slight zig-zag.
Holiday Snaps Day 7
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I am going to put a bow on the bottom part of this seam and as I want the bow to be the focal point I wanted a neutral seam behind it, I have chosen a thread that is a close match to one of the fabrics and started doing a Cretan Stitch after taking the first couple of stitches I realized that I could make a Twisted Satin Chain (TAST week 42) on each stitch, with the thread that I was useing the extra bulk of the Twisted Satin doesn’t make much of a visual difference to the Cretan Stitch but it has given it a nice texture.
Holiday Snaps Day 6
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 For this seam I have used the Lace Border Stitch and flipped it from side to side…I was going to bead it as I did with detail 410 but when I looked at the seam in contents of the whole the area it is located is the most likely area for me to put a bead trail and to have beads on this seam as well would congest the background of the bead trail so I have left my options open and not used beads.
Holiday snaps day 5
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 This afternoon, after I had picked my neice up from school, we decided to work in the garden where we are building a castle…
It started with a tempory retaining wall that I built and she thought that it looked like a castle and I have wanted to build a castle ruin in the garden but hadn’t decided where, so we cleared the space, marked out a circle and built our castle wall…It also is only a tempory structure because I used the bricks that I bought for the paving under the pagola and to have the walls the hight I want the bricks will have to be mortered to make them stable but we put 2 seats, a table and some plants inside, and it makes a lovely little nook to sit and look out onto the garden from.
Holiday Snaps Day 4
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Today I moved onto tast week 41 Lace Border Stitch.
I Started by doing a row of the basic stitch to get a feel for it…A few stitches into the seam I realized that I was making each stitch slightly wider, to correct it I then made each stitch slightly smaller than the last so that the seam took on a nice curved shape.
On the next seam I added a bead before doing the twisted chain and then went back through the bead and continued the stitch.
I blogged day 3 of my holiday.
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I carried the pink project kit north and carried it home again without doing a stitch on it but I did use some of the needles and threads for small repair jobs and I showed it to my sister in law so that it is no longer a secret…and even though I didn’t do any stitching on it while I was away having it all together meant that today, when I wanted to start on the missed TAST Stitches, everything was there ready to go so I just had to pick it up and start stitching…I have used a cotton perle thread for the first missed stitch, Linked Double Chain.
Today is my birthday which I have spent as a quit day, going through photos and blogging day 2 of my holiday, a visit from my sister and neices and talking on the phone as my mum, brothers and friends rang throughout the day.
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My first day home and it is cold and windy so it was good to have an excuse to stay inside and organize the photos….I have photos from my son’s and my camera, contained on 3 DVDs and 2 camera memory cards, I now have them organized into 25 folders, one for each day of my holiday and I have blogged day one.
I was asked Is there a story connected with the name Magnetic Island?, The answer from Wikipedia, The name of the island came about because of the apparent “magnetic” effect it had on the ship’s compass of Captain Cook as he passed the island when sailing up the east coast of Australia in 1770. People have since explored the general area of Magnetic Island with various instruments to discover whatever it was magnetic like Cook experienced, but nothing has been discovered.
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I am home from my Tropical Island Holiday….I must confess that I didn’t want to come home and it has been a long day of travelling but it was nice to see my sister who picked me up from the airport and it will be nice to sleep in my own bed tonight.
I have 1,000 odd photos to go through…it will take me some time to get through them all and I have decided that the best way to organize them is to go through them day by day and backdate the blog posts to the day I took the photos.
I will leave you tonight with an image that I could have taken any day…Magnetic Island has lots of huge boulders, some of which can be seen in this image of a rocky shoreline.
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We went out to Cristies, my brothers favourite swimming hole, where I took these photos.
  On our way home from Christies we went to the Halifax Museum where I found these 2 old school samplers.
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