So I think its official, here in Chicago I make large decorations for the dining/living room windows. This year I made the paper bag snowflakes that I started seeing on Instagram last year. I ordered white bags and found that 8 bags per snowflake was just right. Some people suggest 12 but I think that many would have a tendency to bunch even more at the bottom. And I can’t imagine how they cut through 12 bags at once. I found cutting through 8 difficult enough and made templates so I could cut each one separately and then glue them together.
I don’t really have a kitchen window anymore but I put a garland above the sink and imagine I do. I decorated the garland with snowflakes that were featured in the Sweet Paul magazine last winter. The directions were kind of minimal but I decided to use card stock and figured out how to stitch, with the embroidery thread and baker’s twine, so that they were neat on the back as well as the front. It was fun to come up with so many variations of the designs shown in the magazine.
The snowflakes like the rest of my decorations (except the tree which makes a much shorter appearance) were installed at the beginning of December and will stay up until the end of January.
I got this sign at a Marshalls this year and it seems prophetic since this was a very Gnome Noel. The first new gnome to make an appearance was one we bought on vacation in Sister Bay, Wisconsin this year at a Swedish store next to the Swedish restaurant with goats on the roof! It’s the gray one on the top shelf all the way on the right.
And then we bought the one third from the right at the Swedish museum gift shop here in Andersonville when we went to the Julmarknad at the museum. I bet that means Christmas Market – there were tables with homemade crafts and I bought two gnomes for the tree from one woman.
Then on Christmas I got two more gnomes – the gnome with a heart on his hat that my daughter bought at a Christmas store on the Wisconsin vacation.
And from my Birmingham niece this cute tree gnome she knitted.
There are lots of other gnomes to keep them company here!
I never know what to call that piece of property between the sidewalk and the street. A Google search yields boulevard, berm, median, hellstrip, parkway, verge, swale, and tree belt among others including grassy strip which is what I think I usually default to. They are often controversial since they are usually owned by the municipality but it is the homeowner’s responsibility to maintain them. Some homeowners obviously feel they have a wide latitude – here are a few examples in my neighborhood from a walk I took this Fall.
This memorial bench seems to be a particularily ballsy choice. It comes with instructions.
I first heard of October prompts from Children’s Museum Liz who was participating in an Inktober type drawing challenge. I was intrigued and did some reading about the origin of Inktober the ensuing controversy and the development of other lists. And then I realized there were also Instagram Stitchtober lists and embroidery artists who made 31 different pieces which seemed impossible. It turned out others also had challenges that resulted in one hoop with very small images like pumpkins and ghosts. So I thought maybe I could do that but that I preferred the more openended prompts and when Adam Pritchett created a list of only 13 prompts this year I knew I was in!
When I read through it I immediately thought of Rapunzel and while I realized Rapunzel didn’t work for every prompt I thought other fairy tales would. I realized as I was making a list that I could illustrate six fairy tales so I divided my hoop into six wedges. My list:
Influence – The rampion or rapunzel from Rapunzel
Cursed – The spinning wheel from Sleeping Beauty
Astray- Little Red Riding Hood
Overgrown – Sleeping Beauty again – her castle
Concealed- Rapunzel again – her tower
Lore – Fairy Tales of course. I decided to make a book of Fairy Tales to put in the middle of the hoop
Influence – The Edible Cottage from Hansel and Gretel
Creeping- Handel and Gretel again – the witch
Sorcery- The Evil Queen’s mirror from Snow White
Foresight – The clock from Cinderella
Brewing – Snow White again – the poisoned apple
Crowned – Cinderella again – the glass slipper that ensured she would eventually be crowned
A Dark Power – originally this was just going to be the wolf from Little Red Riding Hood but then I added the Evil Queen to her mirror and some birds (more on those later)
I started by looking for images and adapting them and I transferred some to my fabric with the iron on transfer paper and started stitching and making a lot of changes and additions as I stitched. I wanted to present each day separately and have a final reveal at the end so I came up with the idea of temporary felt frames and since I didn’t like them taking up the whole Instagram post I used PicCollage to combine them with the prompt list. I added a quote from the relevant fairy tale
Adam was a great host. He welcomed me on the first day, liked several of my posts and featured some in his stories.
This was only my third embroidery piece and it was challenging. I pricked my finger more than once and got blood on the fabric which is one of the reasons for the birds. When I was researching Hansel and Gretel for the Influence prompt I found they were influenced even before they found the cottage by a bird who led them there. I considered adding a bird to the roof but didn’t which was lucky because their bird was perfect for covering a blood stain. And I added the birds from the Grimm’s version of Cinderella both to cover a spot and fill in the space which seemed a little empty. I added some other details for the final reveal- extending Rapunzel’s hair and the briars on Sleeping Beauty’s castle and adding some flowers to the Hansel and Gretel panel.
I’m pretty pleased with it although if I do this challenge again next year I think I’ll do it in crossstitch!
It has been a busy Fall so far. In October I started volunteering at the Chicago Children’s Museum again and I also participated in an Instagram #stitchtober challenge so decorating and blogging about it took a back seat. In September I put the leaf pillow I made from a panel Catherine had made on the bench and I filled the vase from Jen that usually sits on the yellow bookcase with an arrangement of feathers. I added the mushroom carving we bought this year at the Lakeview Art Fair.
At the beginning of October I decorated the Halloween trees and put them in the dining room windows as I have been doing and I arranged the Fall and Halloween things on the shelves much as I did last year. I got a real wooden pumpkin at Home Goods so I donated my fake one and some of my other pumpkins.
I had been purchasing small items all year for Day of the Dead offrenda ornaments. I supplemented the purchased items with downloaded images including a stack of John Irving books for Julie, a stack of Sherlock Holmes books for Mummy, a Julia Child cookbook for Catherine, and some Frank Sinatra records for Daddy. Then I assembled a Day of the Dead wreath and hung it between the dining room and living room windows.
For my Halloween treats I used two images I downloaded from Ella Claire Inspired and paired them with bloody bones I found at Target. I wrote B-B-B-Bad on the back. When I gave them to people they usually exclaimed “To the Bone!”
In the beginning of November while most of the Instagram influencers were putting up their Christmas decorations, we hung our Fall branches using the ones we purchased last year again.
No need to hurry Winter!
This official Little Free Library in Ephraim reminded me of an English phone booth. And I found an embroidery themed mystery in it!
This rustic one was at a park at the top of Door County. The book that is standing up was titled “Who Needs Mistletoe?” and since I like Christmas romances I picked it up but it looked more pornographic than romantic so I left it there.
My daughter saw this one in Egg Harbor and snapped a picture for me because she liked that it had a regular sized door knob and plate.
The Kohler Art Preserve offers small notebooks titled Art Preserve Writer and book pockets with prompts to “aid in your exploration of this space” and an invitation to “reflect on your time here after you’re back home: take notes, ask questions, and draw pictures”. The card prompts titled Remember, Record, Revisit, Reflect, and Report include suggestions for entries. For example the Reflect card introduces the concept of windows and mirrors (“a window is a view into a new perspective and a mirror is something you relate to”) and invites viewers to ask themselves as they look at each artist area, “Is this a window or a mirror for me?” and suggests recording ideas next to the floor maps at the beginning of the writer or on the following blank pages.
After we spent a few hours at the Art Preserve we drove to the Kohler Arts Center for lunch and a peek at the art studio. The art studio facilitator used another word beginning with Re as she introduced the space as an opportunity for guests to Respond after exploring the current exhibition of the work of Bernard Langlais.
The Kohler Arts Center art studio is designed with adult guests in mind and has made some coronavirus adaptations. Materials are now stored in individual “ready to create” boxes.
The guest responses to Bernard Langlais are being displayed to create a collaborative piece.
We didn’t have time to spend in the art studio but I definitely will on our next trip!
We stopped at the John Michael Kohler Art Preserve in Sheboygan on our way to our Door County vacation this year. The Preserve preserves artist built environments that can’t be preserved in situ. It includes the work of outsider artists as well as the environments of two artists who were also collectors. Ray Yoshida collected the work of trained artists, outsider artists, and folk artists as well other objects and ephemera. The Kohler Arts Center acquired most of the contents of his apartment when he died and they’ve mostly been in storage since then. The items are now displayed on the second floor of the Arts Preserve looking much as they did in Yoshida’s Chicago apartment.
I could have spent a day just looking at this collection – these photos just give a glimpse of it. A return trip for another look as well as a closer look at Lenore Tawney’s studio collection is definitely in order!
When I started thinking of an image to use for my first self designed hoop embroidery piece, I thought of tattoos and then, of course, of my older daughter’s tattoos. This picture (which hangs on our family picture wall) of her holding her niece (my youngest granddaughter) was taken 4 years ago at my Chicago niece’s wedding only a few months before we found out my daughter had Stage 4 colon cancer.
Luckily my younger daughter found a picture of them in color at her wedding a few years earlier. I must admit I don’t think this picture does justice to either of them. But it is a good shot of the tattoo.
I cropped and enlarged the picture and it was quite a challenge to trace and transfer it to the white duck fabric I had leftover from the Sashiko pillow. I bought some Aunt Martha’s Tracing Paper and an Aunt Martha’s Transfer Pencil at Jo-Ann Fabrics and eventually made a tracing that I was happy enough with to iron on the fabric. It worked but the lines were not as crisp as I would have hoped. I had to do quite a bit of adjusting as I stitched and there are still a few pinkish lines but I decided that I would embrace those as part of the tattoo.
I had written in my last post about hoop embroidery that I still found satin stitch difficult and was excited to learn thread painting. It turns out thread painting is not actually the name of a stitch but of the technique of using long and short stitches to look like brush strokes. So that is what I attempted. I did the outline in stem stitch using two strands of black and then I filled in with three strands using satin or long and short stitches. I used two strands to make tiny back stitches for the bird’s throat and three strands of chain stitch for the little black swooshes on the side.
I painted a 4 inch embroidery hoop black to frame it and hung it next to my dresser. I’m pretty proud of how it turned out both as an embroidery piece and as a tribute to my daughter. I’m not sure what she would think of it but I hope she would appreciate it.
Visually there is nothing that makes the Nettlehorst Little Free Library stand out but recently it has been noteworthy for another reason. For awhile there were high quality children’s books everytime I walked by. Then I found an old copy of Disturbances in the Field, a book I remembered fondly and was excited to read again. Then I started finding books that looked brand new.
On this trip I took that copy of Talk to the Hand by Lynne Truss since I loved Eats, Shoots & Leaves. From books about manners to new fiction the Nettlehorst library has supplied me with lots to read lately!
