Cross Stitch, Creatures, & Craft Shows - Early Autumn Q & A, 2018

Autumn comes to Thunder Mountain

You haven't mentioned cross-stitch lately.  Are you still doing new designs?

Yes, indeed. In fact J.D. and I did a small showing quite recently that featured some of his close-up photographs of flowers from our garden and some of my embroidered pillows with flower designs. I used different techniques for the pillows, but some were done in cross-stitch, with some parts done in double cross-stitch (also called star stitch, and St. George-and-St. Andrew stitch), where I worked what is essentially a plus sign (+) on top of the conventional X. I love the appearance of colorful stitching on checked gingham and used that for these pillows. Here you can see the Iris, the Poppy, and the Sunflower. [Sorry, the Iris pillow sold before we got a photo - J.D.]

Cross stitched pillows

I also did some miniature needlepoint pictures of flowers.  These were framed 3 inch X 5 inch pictures (7.5 cm X 13 cm) done in conventional tent stitch with some back-stitching. No sunflowers this time, but an iris and a poppy were included.

Needlepoint flower "minis"

Finally, here are a couple of J.D.'s photographs from the exhibit.

Flower photos by J.D.

What's on your screensaver? (Asked by a teenager at a recent show.)

Is this a trick question being asked by the younger set of old-timers like me to determine if we are "cool" enough to spend a few minutes with? Yes, I recognize that "cool" is an obsolete — even archaic — term of approval,  and that the current one is probably something I wouldn't even recognize.  (I am glad that "sick" has apparently fallen out of favor!)

Anyway, I do have a story about my current screensaver. It is one of J. J.’s photographs. She loves to take pictures of the sky and clouds. (Look for some of her photos in the post on "Skyscapes in Needlepoint" later this year.)  She saw a large cloud formation that looked to her like a dragon breathing fire and little puffs of smoke. She hurried to capture the image before it could change. When she down-loaded the picture, she was startled to find that she had also captured at the very bottom of the photograph the silhouette of a bicyclist riding along the top of a ridge. We decided to entitle the picture "Racing The Cloud Dragon".

"Racing the Cloud Dragon," photo by J.J.

We framed a print of the picture and offer copies of it in our print catalog, so I was able to show the young man the original. He smiled and thanked me and walked away — not seeming to feel that he had wasted his time.

Like J.J., I have always treasured the pictures seen in clouds and the patterns I see everywhere. When I was a young teenager I used to slip outside on clear summer nights after my parents had gone to sleep. I would climb to the top of our winter wood pile and sit for hours watching the stars. I would pick out the constellations that I recognized, but then form imaginary new constellations from the visible stars and watch them move across the sky. I hope that teenager sometimes looks up from whatever screen he is watching to look at clouds and stars, too.

Are you going to start writing three blog posts a month again, instead of just two?  You said you would when your busy season was over.

I will do that as soon as I can, and I will apologize in advance because it is going to be later than I had planned. This has been by far our busiest year since we started Annake's Garden! The Farmers' Markets stop at the end of September because of the short high-country growing season. (And I wish I could have sent every one of you some of our sweet seedless grapes, which were especially good this year.) But we still have art and craft events scheduled into early December and I have many new projects to complete for those.

I have started a series of needlework "portraits" of our Rocky Mountain wildlife that I am eager to share with you in a few months.  I'm working on more abstract,  geometric,  mosaic and optical illusion designs.  Part II of "Seascapes in Needlework" is in rough draft and will be followed by "Skyscapes" and "Cityscapes". I'm gathering materials for a couple of do-it-yourself projects that I hope you will enjoy.  But I do have to sleep sometimes, so my writing has to be worked into what I laughingly call my "spare time". I'll keep writing, you keep reading, and I hope we will all be happy with the results.

Bighorn needlepoint, ready to frame

Happy Autumn (or Spring, as the case may be*),

*For our Southern Hemisphere readers, of course.

 This post by Annake's Garden is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.