Work, Work, Work 98.

Current Hours: 1,219. Skeins Used: 191. Current hours are from yesterday, today was just too fractional, a bit here, a bit there, and I’m not aware of time enough to keep track things like ‘7 minutes’, ’22 minutes’ and the like, so I just don’t count it. Also, today, I had to spend a fair amount of time line breaking. Usually, I’m not paying attention when I’m working on the tree quilt, my mind tends to wander on to other things while the fingers work. When working on large blocks of one colour, it’s easy enough to fall into doing rows of knots, rather than random sets. I don’t want people focusing on lines or rows, so a few knots here, a few there, break up the visual line.

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Changing of the Thread.

Having gotten thoroughly confused over just which green I had been using, it called for a changing of the thread. Down with the tree thread, up with the foliage thread. Some of the greens, I’m down to 3 skeins, and it doesn’t take much to go through a skein. Others I have a great deal of, so I need to do larger blocks with those particular colours.

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Bad Taste.

Oh, the vintage pistachio Perles (light and medium, 320 and 368), holy fuck, do they ever taste nasty. If you’re wondering why I know what they taste like, it’s because I stick one end in my mouth to get it nice and wet, so it can be easily flattened for threading. I won’t be doing anymore of that with these particular threads. I don’t think these are nearly old enough to have employed arsenic, but who the fuck knows? Even cinnamon mouth wash isn’t getting rid of it. Yikes.

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Succumbing To The Unpickening.

Until now, I’ve avoided unpicking on the tree quilt, which has been so very nice. In my early haste to start the foliage, however, I fucked up. I hadn’t picked up the flow yet, and now that I have it, that first section jars, badly. I’ve left it be, telling myself to give it a chance. It keeps drawing my eye, and leaving a bad taste in the brain, so it must go. Every needlesmith on the planet knows the feelings when you meet up with the unavoidable unpickening. Unpicking knots is not as bad as unpicking, say, a raised satin stitch, but it’s not fun, either. Eh, that wasn’t so bad. At least I didn’t rip the fabric!

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Knotty.

Working on the foliage. The trunk was all Candlewick knots, which are much too small for the foliage. Even French knots are on the small side with the Perle 3, so I’ve combined the two. I get to keep the in front, half infinity movement of the Candlewick, with two wraps added. This gives me a bulkier knot, with the added plus of keeping movements which are now automatic. I usually work with thread lengths of 65 to 85 inches, because it takes very little time to go through that length of thread. Click for full size.

© C. Ford, all rights reserved.