Hejsa!
It felt quite cold when I walked Blake this morning. It felt like winter can’t be far away. I’d like to spend the weekend under a quilt with some kind of hand stitching project. Maybe a mug of hot chocolate… :-)
Yesterday I worked on a mini sketch version for a project I want to make next year:
I have made plenty of notes and paper and ink sketches for this project but sometimes I just need to cut up some fabric to get a proper of what the idea will actually be like. A tangible, physical form. And it’s been really fun to work this small! Each page is only around 2” on both sides. Tiny!
Can you guess what it is? :-)
I will tell you next time when I should have finished the mini version and hopefully have started on the full size version. :-)
It is very rare that I buy other people’s patterns because I can barely keep up with my own ideas, but I did buy a cross stitch pattern yesterday. Which is mad because I usually mess up the counting in cross stitch patterns. But I’m hoping I can get this one reasonably right.
I bought this: Cypress Trees and Stars Pattern. A Palestinian tatreez design from Min Amanne. There are several other (beautiful!) digital patterns as well as kits.
Tatreez is the traditional embroidery of Palestine and it is recognised as an intangible cultural heritage of humanity by UNESCO.
Here are a couple of YouTube videos about Tatreez if you want to know more: A Handmade Tale - An Interview with the Pioneer of Tatreez and Preserving Heritage: Palestine Refugee Tatreez w/ Sulafa Embroidery Centre.
I hope next week I’ll have some Tatreez embroidery to show but I haven’t actually checked yet if I even have some suitable fabric for it. But surely I have some kind of even weave somewhere in my stash?! :-D
Have a lovely weekend!
x Carina
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Some Things I Am Enjoying
Book: Cast Away: Poems of Our Time* by Naomi Shihab Nye.
Audio book: The Old Ways by Robert Macfarlane. Not read/narrated by the author, sadly. The writing feels very personal so it’s weird that it’s someone else reading it…
Music: Listening to my Palestinian Artists (and a couple who aren’t) playlist on Spotify.
Instagram: @tatreezandtea
*bookshop.org affiliate link.
Here is Blake at his check up with the veterinarian nurse yesterday. We had to drag him into the examination room but then she offered him some treats and suddenly he was happy to be there!
His teeth cleaning turned out to be a bigger operation than expected, quite literally. He has never let us clean his teeth and he couldn’t care less about denta stix or whatever. So his teeth were in quite the state and they had to remove six of them. Which meant that it got really expensive and it’s not covered by the insurance, unfortunately. Good thing Blake is very, very cute!
So if anyone is interested in buying one of the mini quilts I made in the summer, the money from those will land in a dog tooth shaped hole. There is free shipping in the UK for the mini quilts, it will be calculated automatically.
I'm excited to see your new project come to life :)