Seeker VIII

Seeker VIII

Video courtesy of Kanchana <3

How would you set this? I actually enamelled this piece quite a while ago, but I hesitated when it comes to setting or framing it, so it’s been sitting in a drawer.

I like the texture at the back and how the title, like the front, reveals itself differently depending on the angle of the light. This made me think of making a brooch (or what about a pectoral?) which would move with the wearer, and the back would be visible when handling it. To that effect I started experimenting with the partial gilt wooden frame, which I was thinking to combine with silver ~ not entirely convinced. I like gold with teal but I can’t afford to set this in gold.

It’s a bit large though… another option is setting it in a frame, which could or not incorporate the gilt frame. I could try to find a way to leave the back partially exposed. But I’m not convinced.

What do you think? Let me know in the comments

Design & wax creation by @lieswambacq.jewelry
Casting by @rayjojuwelen
Engraving by @jewelry_engraving
Enamelling and setting by me @innershelter

The technique is called basse-taille, the engraving under the enamel glitters as the piece moves, watch the video:

One of my favourite incense burners, and some stages of the process.

This one is iron rich stoneware with a copper glaze.

The centerpiece is a gothic tracery trefoil, which I carved by hand out of wax… I used no digital aid of any sort, even the design was created with a compass and dividers.

I had the centerpiece cast in sterling silver, and all the links are securely & painstakingly wrapped one by one with sterling silver wire. All beads are black onyx.

As I opened the IG app to post this video, a reel from @yukikawae reminded me that “simple tasks bring focus”. You can play with a Google Street view randomizer to bring up virtual plein air views that you can sketch (or just visit!). I’m doing a few thumbnails, low stakes. I’ve been feeling a bit burnt out lately and these simple tasks are helpful. If you want to dive in a bit here’s a couple tags: #googlestreetviewart #mapcrunch #googlemapsart

See you on the other side

Do you feel the influence of your surroundings in your creative practice?

I can’t get arsed with social media, not posting much besides a few stories. Don’t check it much either. I know I am not the only one that doesn’t see much point anymore… sometimes missing the older days of the internet. Nobody was making a living out of it, sharing was an end in itself. We didn’t get more people than we do now to see what we posted (although there sure was more interaction, per view let’s say, and it at least seemed more genuine). Why is this not enough now? Because there’s a perceived drop with a while ago? Because some people are very successful at it while most of us are not? Because there’s just so fucking much of it, a lot of it good, and it is both overwhelming and demoralising?

Right now I don’t even feel like making things. “Nobody” gets to see the things I make, and I feel like I’m just making more knick-knacks that then sit in a drawer, like the world needs more of that. I see more and more people announcing that they’re going offline with their creative projects, but I have no idea how one goes about that to be honest, it probably involves going out in the world and meeting people; the thought is slightly alarming.

We’re building a shed at the back of the garden. Probably for a ceramic + woodworking workshop. This house is so congested with workshops. I imagine it as a refuge, a place to escape from monetised endeavours. I hope it can be that.

The pond was the best investment of effort. Granted that most of the effort was Pim’s, so it’s easy for me to say. It is endlessly fascinating. All of the critters have moved in because they found it good enough to be their new home. Well, maybe some of them hitched a ride with the plants. They seem to be doing pretty well. There’s much to learn from pond creatures, just being there and making the most of it.

Opalescent grisaille on green background :)

Process available in my Patreon

I’m not Dutch, and I don’t live in the Netherlands, but they graciously invited me to participate

In western “raku” we fire in a gas oven (although electric, or I suppose wood fire, can also be used), and remove the red hot pots to do a variety of treatments, most often involving a “reduction bin”. This is very spectacular, and the results can also be, although they’re a bit unpredictable so it can also be disappointing.

These two pieces I made got fired during ing @ceramicartclass‘s yearly (pandemics allowing) raku party. The specific technique in this case is naked raku, so called because the end result is actually the bare surface of the clay. So how do you get those cool black cracks?
Raku glazes often fire a bit too “small” for the pot, so they contract as they cool down and this creates the crackled surface. This is accentuated when the red hot pot is put in a fireproof bin with combustible material inside, which catches fire. The bin is closed so the fire searches for oxygen elsewhere (in the pot or the glaze), this is what we call a reduction atmosphere: the oxygen is reduced, and can create cool color shifts and lustre effects in glazes. It also generates a lot of smoke and soot and this colours the clay behind the cracks that form a deep black.

So naked raku is a further exploration of this. The pot’s surface is often burnished or covered in a layer of terra sigillata (very fine, lustrous liquid clay) – I used the latter on very smooth pots. The pot is then bisque fired (fired to “low” temperature, around 1000°C) which transforms the clay into a porous ceramic, and which will make the pot resist the following treatments and temperature shocks. To begin the raku process, first a layer of liquid clay is applied, and on top of this, a layer of raku glaze. After firing the pot in the raku oven, it is taken out at red hot temperature, just as the glaze is beginning to melt. We wait a few moments until we start to hear the glaze crack, put it in the bin, and wait for a few minutes for the soot to be absorbed between the cracks. The pot is then taken out of the bin and shocked with water. This thermal shock causes the glaze to flake off the pot, thanks to the intermediary layer of clay we applied earlier. The result is a naked clay surface, white (or whichever colour the clay or terra sigillata had before) on the parts that were protected by the glaze, and black where this skin cracked.

Thanks to several of my classmates for snippets of video or photos that allow me to better illustrate the entire process, as I didn’t have those details from my own pieces.
These two pots are moss planters, as you can see towards the end of the video and on the class exhibition photo at the top. Here’s one with visitor:

I hope you had a nice first of May. Here we’ve had a somewhat cold and rainy beginning of spring so we’re behind schedule.

The yearly arrival of lily of the valley is something a scent enthusiast is likely to look forward to all winter. Lily of the valley accords -its scent is not extractable beyond very faint and impractical enfleurage- have a place in nearly every composition, often in a supporting role, sometimes as the protagonist. If you have a chance, do not hesitate to sniff these teensy flowers. T​he scent of spring itself.

Other deliciously scented plants in the garden at the moment are blue hyacinths, sweet woodruff (its hay-like, coumarinic scent is released when crushing the dried foliage); the first fig leaves and figlets are peeking out.

Thought & Memory II

For this strand I used the traditional layout of a rosary. Each bead is also individually “rosary-strung” with a couple extra wraps on both sides of each bead. Takes forever but is also meditative work and I really like how durable the end result is, and how well the beads drape.

All sterling + onyx beads. I’m one of those people that can’t sit still, so for me these are fidget beads I suppose! Makes a long necklace as well.

I love freely spinning orbs; designing them, making them, wearing them… if this lapislazuli ring wasn’t too small for my beefy fingers, I’d totally keep it.

The pendant is quartz/rock crystal.

Mistletoe 2022 will go live on Friday 24th of June at 20h CET (that’s 11 AM PDT & 2PM EDT).
My newsletter subscribers get early access.

Something that didn’t dawn on me until much later is that my subconscious had driven me to design all of these pieces as little gates or portals, through which a backlit view of spring appears, dappled sun glittering though the new, yellow-green leaves sprouting from branches. Thus the full name of the collection is Mistletoe: portals onto spring. The theme of greenery, fronds, roots, branches and particles floating in the sunlight spills out onto the frames. The enamel is always in yellow-green to emerald green shades typical of spring, with a combination of techniques used ranging from wet-packing, dry sifting, over-firing and, always, painting on enamel with vitrifiable paints. Multiple firings are necessary, ranging from 910 to 810 °C. For this collection I use a range of stones in green shades, from the waxy opaque yellow-green of serpentine to super glittery, transparent micro-faceted vesuvianite… peridot, prehnite, green spinel, tourmaline, emerald-coloured chrome diopside… Sometimes I add a contrasting touch of warmth with, for example, garnets.

I remain entirely captivated by smoke these days. Burning actual resins today.

This thing, which we should call tjehenet because how cool does that sound? (that’s how the ancient Egyptians called it), is not a clay, not a glaze, not a glass… but rather a little bit of all of those things, sintered quartz with other ingredients, and also fascinating and odd as hell. It contains soluble sodium salts which raise to the surface when it dries and later form the “glaze” when it is fired. The colorant (traditionally and in this case copper oxide, but can be many other things and I’ll be testing that next), is not just on the surface but actually pervades the mass throughout, and manifests just on the surface because the “glaze” forms there and interacts with it. That also makes the composition a bit precious, as in not very cheap

You can see that at least this particular recipe is also sturdy, damn that was the second time I dropped the bird on concrete

I found many recipes but not a lot of rationale as to what each ingredient does there, so that’s why I’ve begun my own series of tests. I have to continue testing for the soluble salts, the drying conditions (here sodium bicarbonate underperformed so much that I think it must be influenced by the humid place in which it dried?), plasticity, colourants etc. When I have some more information I’ll post about it on glazy.org

Such a rabbit hole! I could spend the entire year doing tests for this… although it was just supposed to be a bit of a side thing for my academy project in which I’m exploring ritual objects. I think it will be the perfect material for little talismans! It is so pleasant to touch and hold. And I’m glad to see that it’s not too brittle its history is also very cool of course.

I’m using a couple of cradled panels as practice before I tackle the final stage of my living room mural (writing a post about that).

First time using acrylics so I wanted to get to know them at least a little bit. I’m using Golden fluid acrylic and soft medium when I want transparency. I can go on and on now…. but if you have any questions just ask in the comments. I have to admit to have felt rather snobby about acrylics until I started researching more about them (SO much more! The people at Golden are a gold mine indeed). The possibilities really are amazing. Besides these panels and the mural I am, oh yes, gonna combine them with my enamel work.

I’ve also been very busy with the translation to English of Andreu Vilasís’ book. We have ISBN! it is becoming a very real thing

In this collection, Aves, I portray birds seeking, and finding, their own personal treasures.

Here’s Seeker III: https://innershelter.net/product/seeker-iii/

Since I fail to update the blog for every piece I make, which I really should be more consistent with… well you can find all pieces for this collection in their gallery. I am pretty good at keeping those collection galleries updated :)

Above, my first Poppy created in pâte-de-verre, coming out of the mould.

My mind is bubbling with the possibilities of this technique!

If you like instant gratification, this is not for you each piece is first sculpted with clay, then a mould taken of the sculpt. Once set, the clay is removed thus destroying the original form. All your eggs are now in one basket!

You then have to wait three weeks for the moulds to dry before the pieces can be fired. The glass is carefully placed in the mould, and a lot of variables have to be taken into account, much like in enamelling! Many choices are taken at this stage. Size of the glass grains, which greatly influences the result, transparency or opacity, colour, etc.

The firing and controlled cooling of the kiln takes well over a day. Then the big surprise of the kiln opening and the breaking of the moulds and after that, the pieces need to be sanded and refinished with diamond tools.

Fabels, meaning Fables, was the theme of the group exhibition and the eclectic group of extraordinary artists interpreted this though their own personal prism. I loved this exhibition and was very happy to take part in it!

Below you can see a gallery of images taken by Roger de Keyser, who kindly has given me permission to share with you. Scroll further down to also see an informal video I took during the vernissage. The child dancing to the live harp performance is my son :)

It’s a jar to rinse watermedia brushes. Here’s a few photos:

On Instagram you can see the video with some nice music.

And here’s a mug. I carved a stamp to imprint the mushroom and then highlighted it with black iron oxide, after glazing and firing it looks like this:

These four little cauldrons are also available in my Etsy :)

A few of you are subscribed to receive these updates, in which case I would recommend that you subscribe to my newsletter instead. https://innershelter.net/newsletter/

I’ll have to look into this and see if there’s any other similar alternative, and if other types of RSS feed will be affected (I still follow blogs through RSS that I read through feedly, do you?), but I can’t promise I’ll have the time to do that or that I’ll find anything, sorry!

At the end of 2019 I was invited to participate in a group exhibition called Fabels (Fables), which was to take place in June 2020. You can imagine what happened next.

I made a couple of pieces specifically for this exhibition, here at left is the one I finished already back then. The other is a much more elaborate piece that I haven’t actually finished constructing, but I do plan to soon.

So this one is the crow Canuck, a friendly neighbourhood crow that sadly went missing around that time. The reference picture for this piece was Canuck holding three linked split rings in his beak. As fables go, surely Canuck, with such a personality, should have his modern-day one. This necklace is made in vitreous enamel over copper, using the techniques of painted enamel (for the background, in which I used transparent over opaque enamels) and painting on enamel: to paint the crow portrait I used vitrifiable paint. The rings are made in burnishable silver, so they’re shiny as well. The setting is sterling silver, amethyst and onyx. I had kept Canuck under wraps since I wasn’t sure if I should show it before the exhibition.

Fabels is, in fact, going to happen in 2021! Now, time has passed and I don’t know if I might end up choosing another piece for it, as we move on and new ideas come. In any case, here’s Canuck :)

I’ve been working on more corvids! I’ll show you that next.

This is Mistletoe VII
And it’s my newest make

If you pay attention you’ll see that the silver is not polished all over, in fact, this is, how should I call it? an ombré polish. It starts out brushed and patinated black at the top left, and gradually becomes more bright, at an angle, until it’s highly polished at the bottom.

I’m super happy with this finish, which is very difficult to photograph or even capture in video, but really prominent in person (is everything I make like this??). And I’ve never see or heard or anything like it, and can’t find it on google, so remember kids: you saw it here first

Also: it won’t last because silver naturally tarnishes and changes in contact with the atmosphere and with our skin, so let it be a somewhat ephemeral reminder of your own mortality… or something much more lighthearted if you prefer :D

The stones are vesuvianites.

There’s always a lot on my desk, so it was such a huge respite when we replaced the tiny antique desk (no worries it just travelled to another room) with a big wall to wall thing that has made my workflow so much easier. Instead of constantly moving things around to clear a tiny space to work, I now just wheel myself a bit left or right, and the desk is deep enough that essentials, and I’ve got many essentials can permanently live on top of it. And my computer always on a corner! I do a lot of video editing so this is big. I’m grateful every day.
What’s now on my desk is a bunch of pieces that belong to my Mistletoe collection, in different states of undress. The enamels are mostly done, although you never know… I just broke one in setting so it needs to be remade   it’s all part of the game.

A technical note for fellow enamelists: my desk is very high. It actually perhaps a little too high, but as it was falling close to the windowsill height, I decided to make it all one, wall to wall (nearly 3 metres), deep, 80 centimeters at the deepest point, where the windowsill is included, as this gives me more space. There’s a radiator under the window, so to keep it radiating we put a grill on the desk, that we still need to make flush. In practical terms that just means there’s space for a couple of baskets for the cats, which are constantly visiting me in my door-less workshop, and if they have a basket they’re more likely to sleep instead of asking for cuddles (and leaving hairs in my work ).
Coming back to the height for many types of enamel work, we need to bend over and close to the work, very close to the work for miniature painting. This is awful posture, ask my cervical contracture, so lowering your chair a lot until the desk seems ridiculously high, or raising the desk, helps straighten that neck and still have the piece right under your nose. Of course what I find most important is to change posture often.

A desk chair with height adjustment, and taking care to alter height, posture, and as much as possible to do a few varied tasks throughout the day.

As I said my computer lives on the desk as well. It’s almost at standing desk height, over 90 centimeters, so I got a standing desk stool from Ikea (Gunnared, highly recommended)… I had a lot of doubts about this setup since I suffer from nearly all my joints, but it has worked great so far. I indeed sometimes stand at my computer as well, and I try to avoid it, but sometimes a full day working at the computer just needs to happen, and it’s been ok! My old desk chair, also from Ikea, an older model no longer made, no arm rests which I find uncomfortable, and superb lumbar shape for me, is now my enameling and jewelry bench chair. Jewelry benches are also high

A full day of miniature work is real torture for eyes, neck and wrist. Remember to go out and have a walk, and a good recommendation from my eye doctor: look far as often as possible, preferably at things at least a kilometer away. Grateful for that window. The country is flat but there’s some tall trees in the park a distance away!

To go with the video…

Sometimes I wonder if my style does look a little all over the place to other people. Since I live in my own mind, of course it feels perfectly cohesive to me The skulls and the flowers, mist and dappled sun, all of it is one.

I grew up in a concrete jungle, but right at the foot of a large hill-park. My life was full of grey blocks, but also full of long walks with my dad, through the steep evergreen paths.

The park was dilapidated, abandoned for decades ever since a turn of the century (the previous one of course) world expo covered the hills in grand, but foundation-less, crumbling staircases, fountains and buildings – now housing art museums. A civil war, post-war and transition period later, the place was gloomy, overgrown, and intensely beautiful to my young eyes.

That all changed again in 1992 when the olympics came to town and the park was hurriedly fixed up, but the place as it was then had already engraved a deep groove in my brain.

From there I think, spring all the themes that fascinate me: the passage of time and the seasons, decay and the fate of all things, both the living and those inert. Wilderness, overgrown nature, slowly but surely covering the marks of humanity upon the landscape. History, art, a particular sense of proportion. Perhaps even my colour palette…

Last summer I lost my dad, and all my memento mori suddenly took on a deeper meaning. He was cremated on the sea-side of this hill, and as his carbon wafted down the hillside and over the Mediterranean sea, the swifts swooped around me, standing at the cemetery’s atrium.

Anyway, now that some shipping restrictions have been lifted after all this covid craziness, I have updated my Etsy shop, which I had abandoned for a few years.

I recently created a few earrings within my Mist collection (page updated too, woot!! I even wrote a bit about it hehe).

I rarely create earrings, even though I like to wear them, and who doesn’t? It is due to a combination of factors, I think. One is, that if I am gonna split my little painting in two, I like to have a reason for it, such as this one:

However, I also came to find that I love to split up a landscape in two, and it is lovely to see it reveal as you wear them and turn your head. These and more are now available!

This pair of earrings has special significance for me.

I took the photo that directly inspired them while on my way to what became my last desk job. After a month, I quit, thanks to a really disagreeable and untrusting boss. I suppose I should thank him now!

Opalescent & transparent enamels, stains and onglaze, all applied in layers. The stones are onyx.

This is my 3rd class, and it has been a difficult birth. I may be a bit of a perfectionist over this, which makes the process slow and painful. I often redo the entire process multiple times, until I am happy with audio, video, script and clarity. An additional complication is that I do absolutely everything myself… except the music, for that I use works generously shared in a creative commons license.

Enameling, teaching, keeping in mind what another person needs to learn, while recording, speaking to camera, making sure everything is in frame and focus, gets quite challenging and is exhausting. But I have to say it is all very worth it and am very happy with the results, and the great feedback I receive.

And I am already plotting my next class, of course :D

Social media is a really terrible thing. On the other hand it’s also made alternative livelihoods possible. So we’ll leave it at that.

But I do miss livejournal. I fail to post here regularly, so here comes a lj type post.

Before Erik was born (2017) I started three (3!) blankets. The grey blanket I want to talk about I started in 2013 though, so perhaps it wasn’t meant for him, but I’m not sure anymore, I dont remember.  Erik was a long time in the making and the process was far from uneventful. Let’s also leave it at that.

In any case I have three started blankets, and since I’m good at small fiddly projects and bad at large ones (I did however finish a blanket for my father, tap on the back), this is quite insane. Also, they’re all way too ambitious.

One is a quilt. Made of hexagons. My first quilt. I’m still occasionally making hexagons.

One is a double knit blanket. Total insanity. I specifically  started that one for Erik, and I’ll be happy if its finished before I die.

And the last and oldest project is a very simple blanket made out of small squares, simple as blankets go, but the rub is that I can’t sew worth a damn. And I hate it. But nevertheless I found the project with 20 squares done and ineptly sewed up. Also an additional 5 squares of which 4 have to be redone because they’re misshapen.

I’ve just partially frogged one and reknit it. The stitches seem to fit (when years pass I never know how my knitting might have changed).

Let me go on a tangent. The problem when you don’t write regularly is that there’s too much to write about. The previous status type post is this one from over a year ago. I guess a lot has happened, health problems included, and yet it feels like not enough.

Let’s see if I can put my recent employment history in a few words. I had a graphic design job. The company was bought and about to move away way, waaay too far from me. Normally we could have negotiated a dismissal, like some people did, but I was about to take my maternity leave so this, they said, was not possible, can’t fire a pregnant woman. So I had to quit. Meant no income after my maternity leave. So I searched for a job and took whatever, but close home. I started working when Erik was 6 months old, an admin job, which bored me to tears, but had a duration of a year. When the time came I searched but didn’t find anything, so I went on unemployment for a while. That’s when I had some time to finish my workshop, turn on my kiln again, record one class, buy a wheel and ceramic kiln and other things. Then I found a job, another graphic design one, not too far. Turns out the boss was a total asshole who basically conned me with my contract and then proceeded to treat me like shit. So i decided that, with some little savings in the bank, it was time for me to give it an honest try, so i quit.

I am now self employed, except that i dont make nearly enough to make it official, so I am living off my savings, and my partner’s generosity. I now have two classes published, a patreon with 18 patrons (thank you!) which is totally not worth the effort i put into it but such is the way these things start (and sometimes remain, but let’s be positive), my knitting patterns which make a tiny amount of money every month, another side hustle of ceramics which has made me another tiny sum so far, my enamel store in my site plus the Etsy that I reopened, but I haven’t sold a single thing, predictably. I refuse to underprice my work any longer, and as a result, my style has lost its admittedly already small audience, which can’t or won’t  afford what my pieces are worth. So be it.

The idea is to build all these things up to a small income. For the new year Erik has started going to an after school “daycare” type of thing which gives me an extra 2-3 hours extra 4 days a week. So now I’m starting to have a decent amount of time to put into it.

Also predictably, I’m really ill suited and inexperienced to this self employment thing. I’m wracked by anxiety and worry, as my savings quickly dwindle, which doesn’t help, but I’m slowly getting better at it.

It’s thus difficult to take a day off (in addition to the myriad school holidays, Wednesday afternoons etc), but that’s just what I’m doing today. I’m giving myself a sick day, since I caught a virus, and knitting, which I haven’t done in a very long time. Despite the moping around, yesterday I managed to do a couple of Patreon things and start a setting and cook dinner (omg), but today I’m knitting.

I’m knitting with delightful handmade holly needles and a fluffy wool/alpaca yarn. It’s good.

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In this digital workshop we explore a vitreous enamel technique with rich history, grisaille, in its 20th century incarnation developed by Andreu Vilasís.

Grisalla òpal utilises beautiful, semi-translucent opalescent enamels, to build volume in a delicate low relief on the traditional dark blue background. The results are magical.

This video class includes:

• Downloadable two hour HD video class (4.8 GB)
• Downloadable PDF with templates and list of materials
• Access to private classroom on Facebook

The HD video covers the following:

• Introduction to the technique, history, tools and materials (23 minutes)
• Project 1: Celtic knot (14 minutes)
• Project 2: Möbius strip, firing procedure (34 minutes)
• Project 3: Acanthus leaf (49 minutes)

This is not a beginner class, intermediate level in enamelling is necessary, and some drawing or painting experience strongly recommended. The preparation of the bases is only lightly touched upon, in order to dedicate as much time as possible to the wet-packing technique.

Please be aware that the enamels used in this technique are traditional leaded enamels. You also need access to an enamelling kiln.

If you want to participate in the private Facebook classroom, please send me an email to enamelworkshop@gmail.com, from the address you purchased your copy, indicating your screen name so I can add you.

Subscribe to Enamel Workshop’s newsletter here.

Follow this link to read Patsy Croft’s review of this class.

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I haven’t been posting in a while, but I’ve been very busy! :D

I have recorded the footage for next class over at enamelworkshop.com, but the voiceover has been on hold since I have been sick and voiceless for basically the entirety of 2019 so far! Jeezers. Soon I hope. These are the projects:

Since I can work on the bench even if I have no voice, I have kept busy finishing the enamelling and making settings for a bunch of Mist series pieces. I’m getting more confident with settings and this is very encouraging! Here they are:

Mist VI

Mist VII

Mist VIII

Mist IX

Mist X

Mist XI

Mist XII

Mist XIII

That’s a handful :D most of these are available for sale, find them here.

So I fired my kiln up in December for the first time in 5 years!

To warm up (I was terrified XD) I made some opaque palettes. Then some transparent palettes. And I filmed it. Then, yesterday I finally got to some real enamelling. And it was good! more on that below ;)

I had a holiday break after filming, now with a kid it’s something that happens, he’s still young enough to need constant attention, and daycare is closed during that time. It will be the same with school. After the holidays I edited the footage (some learning curve there) and I published it a couple of days ago. Here it is! ^^

Do subscribe to the Enamel Workshop newsletter (link here) if you do not want to miss any release.

So far the feedback has been very positive. Let me know what you think or if you have any questions. If anyone is still reading blogs :D

So, on to yesterday’s enamelling.

I have tons of bases, started or half finished stuff, and a stack of sketchbooks full of designs. Enough to keep me busy for years even if I wouldn’t get any new idea!

I decided to take out the bases I have around, and found their corresponding sketches. Also found a bunch of sketches for pieces I have finished in the past. I will be posting about that later.

I selected a sketch and bases from 2009. It is a beluga whale swimming next to an iceberg, and I added a calf!

I see that the idea has been kicking around in my head for a while since I also found this watercolor sketch from a year ago or so.

Anyhow, it is not finished, since I will add detail with onglaze, probably today.

These tubes are not new, they were on clearance and compared to my newer Horadam tube, they look a bit different (see below).

The colors are:

• 214 chrome orange PO65
• 533 cobalt green dark PG26
• 655 yellow ochre PY42
• 224 cadmium yellow light PY35
• 227 cadmium orange light PO20
• 213 chrome yellow (hue) deep PY65

Reopening of the Wolfers Frères jewellery store, 1912
Wed 29-11-2017 – Sun 06-01-2019

105 years after the official inauguration of the Wolfers Frères jewellery store in 1912, visitors will once again be able to admire the shop in its original form. To do this, the Art & History Museum has cleared a room of approximately the same shape and area as that originally foreseen by Victor Horta in the building in rue d’Arenberg in Brussels.

On the basis of a thorough historical study, the showcases and the counters will be reinstalled as Horta designed them in his time. First, it was necessary to take down the provisional arrangement of a part of the furniture in the museum and then obtain from storage the remaining interior elements. Even the original entrance doors will be reintegrated. Visitors will be able to walk around an identical reconstruction of the room, like elite customers of the past.

So this was pretty cool. I love these gorgeous display cabinets. The glass enclosures were both a blessing and a curse. The reflections are not distracting to the human eye, and you can get very close to the objects. But it makes photographs very difficult! No flash photography was allowed, and I would have been able to take much more decent pictures with the DSLR and a polarizer filter, but I just had my phone with me, and it doesn’t take pictures as good as my previous (great camera but at that price point I was very disappointed with the planned obsolescence features…), but it will have to do. So yes, the glass enclosures allowed me to simply plaster the phone against the glass to take a close and as sharp as possible picture.

I’ve prepared a few different galleries below so you can easily find what interests you. First is the (enamelled) jewellery in the Horta+Wolfers expo. Then comes the rest of the pictures I took in the expo. After this, I wandered the rest of the permanent collection for several hours, and here I show you the enamelled objects I found. I tried adding captions as I could, but some of my pictures of labels are confusing or too blurry, and eventually it was just taking me too long. If you want mor einfo about anything in particular, let me know and I might find it in my pictures.

Enjoy!

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I also made an apron last weekend, split at the middle but with some overlap. I recycled an old curtain and ties from an old pair of pants. And some thread I had around, I used it all up. Had just enough, using other less matchy threads in the shuttle.

I never got to show the little pots that got fired from my wheel throwing class. They glazed four of them. I didn’t want the rest glazed, what’s the point if someone else is doing it? Plus they had a choice of an ugly blue and red. So got glazed a small planter with dish, a little pot for brushes and another small pot that my parents will want to take with them when they come for a visit soon.

The rest, dunno. They’re bisqued. They’re all very small since the bigger ones did not dry properly or enough to trim. And then they shrink further of course. They’re nothing useful or to write home about, but they’re also not bad considering that was my first time touching a wheel (although not the first time touching clay), they’re not too thick, they’re quite symmetrical, they’re round and the wall is of even thickness (a few have a bottom that’s too heavy though, I would have liked to trim further but I did not have more time). Some pics I took this morning in the kitchen, with artificial lightning… it is already dark in the morning. I realise I’m missing one pot which I forgot in a closet, but whatever.

So I believe we will not be using the wheel the first year, but I am actually looking forward to all the other ways you can build with clay. I did modeling with clay in Llotja for 4 years and I loved it. We used a rough, very groggy refractory clay, and water and sponges were forbidden. It was the best basis for thinking in 3D, it has been very helpful in many other things I’ve done afterwards.

I needed a bit of a creative outlet, what with no workshop and so on, and I decided to inscribe to an initiation to pottery wheel course. The schedule was doable and this is something I had always wanted to do. I did in fact inscribe to ceramic after I got my enamel diploma in Llotja, but shortly after starting I found a full time job (which I desperately needed) and had to stop, which was sad. And before that, in the first common years in the academy, we had clay modelling classes, which I absolutely loved!

My grandfather was a potter! he died when my father was 4, though, so I never met him. And I don’t think any of the items he made was kept in the family, sadly.

So this week I attended the last class (these were 10 three hour classes). I went through 3 bags of clay :) We did not keep anything we did for the first half or so, which I think is a great strategy to keep on trying stuff till you break it, you learn much more that way. I ended up with 14 items that will be fired, hopefully. Four are already bisque fired and I took them home.

I’ll see if I can rescue the rest later.

Problem now is… that I liked it too much. My original plan was to just continue going to the next level of these classes, but then they told us that they’re moving away, too far from me.

Then I started looking for an alternative. And after much deliberation I decided to inscribe to Leuven’s art academy, SLAC. This is 4 years, more of a commitment. But why not, you only live once. The entire year also costs the same than the 10 classes I have just done, a no brainer! I think the first year there is no wheel, but there’s plenty other cool stuff to do anyway.

This will be 10 hours a week, so I need a bit more discipline to still find time for my family. The classes are Thursday and Friday evening (so compatible with eventual day jobs) and Saturday morning.

My current full time work contract ends in October, though, so I don’t know what will happen after that. Classes start the first of September!

I got it directly from China on aliexpress.com, apparently this is also used by dentists. I’ve afterwards seen it resold on art stores with a markup.

I originally intended to use it for watercolour or gouache, but it is so dainty and perfect that I think I’ll keep it to use with my on glaze pigments! Andreu Vilasís managed to instill lots of old school daintiness into us students when he taught us to use vitris. He helped us build little boxes with tiny compartments and framed glass palettes in which to store the tools and pigments.

And it works! all the paraphernalia puts you in the necessary frame of mind for this type of work: to slow down, enter some sort of nearly meditative state, zoom into miniature mode, focus.

I don’t know if the porcelain palette will be more useful than the flat glass palette (it is useful that is has a cover which will keep dust away), but I will try it. A Victorian outdoor watercolour setup also appeals! bit heavy tho.

Another option which I am seriously considering is a dedicated enamel/jewellery rendering palette with a mix of watercolours and gouache. I’m planning building some small books with nice hot press paper and start rendering some of my quick pencil sketches into these. No enamel/jewellery workshop for at least another year, I estimate, so I can at least have better renders, which is all I may actually be able to do in a long time, if not ever.

“Painting in watercolor is making the best of an emergency.”

J. S. Sargent

Our windows have UV protection so taping to them is not an option, outside it has to be.

I am testing the colours I have the most doubt about, together with others which are controls in either direction:

• Holbein shadow green (perylene green PBk31)
• Holbein royal blue (indanthrone blue PB60)
• Holbein imidazolon brown (PBr25)
• Holbein perylene maroon (PR179)
• Holbein pyrrole rubin (PR264)
• Schmincke madder lake*
• Daniel Smith pyrrol red (PR254)
• Daler Rowney indian yellow (tube labeled PY153, box labeled PY83 which is less lightfast)
• Daniel Smith Hansa yellow medium (PY97)
• Schmincke lemon yellow (PY3)

*(this is an old half pan of the Akademie line and I am not sure what it contains, but surely some PR83)

Now to wait months and months!

This is a public service post :) I don’t think I am qualified to be reviewing watercolour papers, but since I cannot find any non-Japanese information over this paper on the internet, I feel kind of obliged to.

I got two pads and one block of Japanese paper on a recent order, so far I tried the Muse Lamp Light 100% cotton paper only (two pads, F2 & F4, both 300g/m2, spiral bound), so perhaps I will review the White Ibis Holbein paper at a later date. I have not made any special testing on these papers, simply just painted on a few of them.

The blocks have a peculiar triangular perforation. This is supposed to provide a clean tear-out and the leftover paper behind the rings can be easily removed. Very neat, it is nice to see such attention to detail. The paper is not nuclear white, it has a veeery slight creamy tint to it.

There is no indication of what type of press this paper is. It has a small grained but noticeable texture to it. In this image you see how granulating paint (predominantly DS French ultramarine) settles into the small dimples:

It seems to be quite heavily sized, the first wash of paint doesn’t readily absorb. This really helps achieve textured strokes, if that’s what you’re into (it makes me think it may help achieve textured brush calligraphy strokes).

This can be a bit annoying when it comes to applying an even wash, I found I had to insist and brush several times to get an even coverage. Once the first wash dried, though, I found I could easily work additional layers, and it was not easy to remove pigment from previous layers, which I actually love! I have been having problems with other papers from which previous layers lift very readily. I personally find the little bother with the initial wash well worth it due to the properties on consequent layers, since it allows a lot of control.

I could work many layers, which perhaps due to influence from enamel I like to do (and also probably I need to do due to not being very experienced with watercolour), and the paper took it all in stride wonderfully.

Scrubbing pigment off the paper did not damage it at all, and I could paint over that with no problem whatsoever. I have not tried any sort of gummy resist yet.

My observations seem to more or less correspond to the description I could find in their website (after I wrote all of this). Here is the Google translation of it:

Lamp light
Uses: Watercolor, pastel, colored pencil
Description of item: It is a luxury watercolor paper that provides “a way to go back”. The lamp light is a new type of watercolor paper developed with the concept of a warm color system white background and 100% cotton rich coloring concept. The coloring is good as the pigment is strongly repelled and the pigment remains on the surface, so it is easy to control on the screen such as blurring, bleeding and lifting. Masking effect can be obtained by color fastening (lifting) of small brush with moderate water attached after fixing, which is designed to be slow. The extent of decolorization of over coated areas can also be adjusted by the amount of water to be given and the degree of wiping. If you apply a fixing medium in advance to the place you want to fix, you can set up a coloring plan with both lifting properties and favorable fixing properties.

So all in all I am very happy with this paper and it may be my favourite from all I have tried so far (which granted is not a whole lot).

I’m LOVING perylene green! It is black in masstone and a beautiful neutral-warm green in a wash. I’m also liking perylene maroon.

I cannot find any information about the papers I bought in the western internet. They’re all 100% cotton and made in Japan. Mini review soon!

I finally decided how to go about the swatches so I made a board template, recycled from the backing of a watercolour pad. I get 6 swatches out of an A4 piece of paper, and by using the template I save lots and lots of time!

I’m testing 5 characteristics: 1: gradation, 2: opacity, 3: lifting & staining, 4: blooming, 5: bolting. I’m using Indian ink (from Sennelier), testing opacity over it. All swatches are done on dry paper except, partially, the bolting one. Once dry, I scrub half the lifting swatch with a wet brush and then blot up the paint, on the blooming swatch I drip one drop of water over a half-dry swatch (I think I have been waiting too long, however…), and on the bolting swatch I wet half the swatch and then paint next to it until touching the wet side.

First I did a few swatches on Canson XL mix-media paper. A lot of people hate the lined texture of this paper, but I love it. It doesn’t seem to be a good choice for swatches though, since the directionality of the texture affects the behaviour of the paint too much. I repeated the swatches on Canson XL aquarelle, and I think I will continue to use this one.

Let’s see if I can make a few of then every day until I swatch all the paints I have!

My little obsessions fluctuate, and I am in the middle of a watercolour peak at the moment. It is always my go-to medium for any project sketching beyond a quick doodle with pencil and/or pen. It has something in common with enamel that perhaps attracts me: nice enough results when left to chance, but high difficulty to actually control the outcome. And perhaps also brilliance and transparency!

Needless to say I am nowhere near the level of control I have with enamel when it comes to watercolour, not enough hours of practice on my back. I still love it, however, and admit to give in to chance sometimes, and let it do its unpredictable thing for fun, but I also like to sit down with a little more time (difficult to come by more than 30 minutes at the moment) and shoot for a target.

My first watercolour palette, in the 90’s, was a 12 pan W&N Cotman. That was amazing in comparison with whatever round-pan monstrosity I had encountered in my youth (even though I tested the remnants the other day and I found it pretty terrible). Later in the naughties I got a Schmincke 24 pans Akademie palette. That is also their student line but I think the quality is the same than the regular line, but with a very limited choice. That again was a great revelation!

I don’t even know what prompted me a few weeks ago, something on the internet, but I forgot. I started reading about colours and pigments (this information was very difficult to come by in the 90’s, the internet really is awesome), and I unearthed the palettes again. I think I had not used them since I doodled some rooms for our house renovation a few years ago. I also like to use watercolour to mix colours and then try to match them with wall paint swatches, I get nicer choices that way I think!

I learnt that some colours are single pigment, and some two or more, how those “convenience mixes” can indeed be convenient, but you should at least know what you are working with. I already knew some colours to be fugitive, but I learnt much more about why and how, and that nowadays you can build a palette out of exclusively permanent colours that is not only as good as those of old, but much better.

I learnt of entirely new to me pigment families. Some discontinuation prompted me to order some tubes… always a bad reason! With my lack of familiarity I managed to order the wrong thing, haha! I chose and very nicely managed to not get upset. It is easy. I brushed up a few samples of my current palette (some of the old colours removed, new ones added) and was amazed at the improvement. So many possibilities! The “wrong” shades (all multiple pigments!) are brilliant on their own right and a fantastic addition to my palette. I now have a lot of paint and a much better idea on how to choose better once my Schmincke half pans run out.

This is not only a choice to look on the bright side of life. That sounds too much like self-deception. It is a choice to focus only on what is under your direct control (not the future, not the past, nothing external, not the actions of others… not much really) which has had a transformative effect on me of late. So liberating, I do recommend this book and also this one. And Seneca.

Schmincke really does have a very weird selection on their premade palettes! I removed a lot of colours. I bought some Daniel Smith tubes (tubes are new to me!) and sticks. DS does not make pans, but the sticks are apparently the exact same pigment than used in the tubes, the cured stuff of pans, but onna-stick! I cut them up and put them in double and single pans. I think I prefer working from pans, there are several pros*, but not all DS colours are available in stick form, and I wanted to make a custom convenience premix of Italian burnt sienna and French ultramarine (I find I need more of this sienna than ultramarine to get as neutral as possible). There were a couple more sticks I wanted to order but I messed my shopping cart up I think! Really getting old here :)

I also got paper, an Escoda travel brush (I am now wondering why not get all brushes in travel format? If the brush is as good, there are no disadvantages), a Pentel water brush and a hake brush. I just ordered a few more brushes (I mainly have some ox hair brushes which are not brilliant, and I am also using my sable enamel brushes which I shouldn’t!), then I’m set for a long time.

I am however not willing to share my sad watercolour attempts :)

Later:
Well… it took me so long to post this that the new brushes arrived. I tested them very quickly and I am so far very happy with them! I got a couple of them thinking of enamel, but we’ll see. The tiny pointy one is not short enough I think.

The pocket brushes are delightful! And so it that Series 22 brush, wow!

*That I can gather:

1. Pans/sticks are already dry, so drying out of tubes, punctures etc are of no concern. Particularly important for very occasional users like me.
2. No waste of packaging (metal tube, in the case of sticks, also the pans).
3. More economical, I read somewhere that the stick has 50% more weight of pigment per gram, which makes sense since there is much less water content. You can get 4 to 5 half pans out of one stick. All DS sticks are of the same price, while the same colour in tube can be of a more expensive series.
4. Related to the above, a possibility of less binders or fillers (even if just water).

Mittens with a thumb for baby.

Out of the newborn phase, babies want to grab things, and thumbs help. These mittens are chubby-proportioned to fit the hands of babies up to 12 months, and have a baby-thumb-shaped-thumb.

Mirrored, left and right mittens with gusseted thumb.

I recommend you join them to a length of i-cord or otherwise attach them to the clothes so that they don’t get lost.

What you’ll need
3 mm (US 2½ ) circular needle or DPNs.
85 metres / 93 yards of fingering weight yarn of each MC and CC. A tapestry needle, two bits of cotton yarn, a stitch marker.
Skills
Casting on, knitting and purling, working in the round, grafting.
Size
One size: 6-12 months.
Gauge
30 sts and 40 rows = 10 cm in St st.

I’ve been neglecting the quilt a bit. I have no sense of urgency because Erik won’t be able to use it for a long time yet. I suppose he could use it as a mat, but he does have plenty of mats.
And his room won’t be ready for a long time yet. We got him a second hand wardrobe in perfect condition (Ikea’s Trogen which has been discontinued, it matches his Gonatt crib), but we put it in the staircase landing outside our bedroom and the upstairs bathroom (where he sleeps and where the changing table is, respectively). It is very useful in there and there it will remain until he moves upstairs. I’m in no hurry. Everybody sleeps wonderfully through the night. He is now using the crib all the time because he outgrew the BabyBay by 4,5 months or so, he’s a long baby!
But I digress.

So mostly I am knitting instead, but I make a few hexies now and then, and I store them in a little box by the sofa. All the fabrics rest in a basket under the coffee table.

I cut the fabric in (larger) hexagons too, so I have very, very little waste. I just have a sheet of paper with 7 cm wide hexagons printed on it and small holes punched at the vertices, I mark the fabric and cut it with scissors.

Sigh. I found a post “Quilt 3” in my drafts which I forgot to publish, more than a month ago. So here it is:

I’ve got the background / back fabric! I was a bit set on linen, for some reason (the best for my baby? am I one those people now? ;) ), and a beautiful Belgian linen I got. I brought a hexie of each fabric to Max Bloch, and there I saw a white linen looked better than natural flax, grey or ivory. It is not nuclear white, but it is white.

I expect the texture will change a bit when washed, and I’ll get quite a lot of shrinkage (for the record, I am pre-washing all fabrics – I don’t expect every one to shrink in the same proportion). I got 3 metres, I’ve now talked myself into a simple plain white back, so it should be plenty even with the binding (not sure if I’ll do rounded corners and thus use bias binding). Hopefully I have enough for a pillowcase or two. I have some ideas for extending the fabric, which maybe are good in themselves!

They had a huge bunch of Vichy/Gingham in different colours and check sizes, I think I’d like to make a quilt with the same colour (probably black or grey) but different check sizes… I’m so boring!

As it couldn’t be otherwise, I also got three more fabrics for the quilt, sigh ;D all grey, 1/4m of a plain medium grey (I only had darks and lights), and 1/2 each of two pretty geometric prints. Both of them have a hexagonal grid base, and they work great for the hexies. I’m actually considering adding a little yellow to the triangle print fabric with fabric paint. Crazy.

And the two fabrics with daisies/popcorn will most likely drop. Pim doesn’t like them, and I am on the fence, and having so many other nice ones, why include them?

Meanwhile, I am making more hexies…

For my records, price of the fabrics:

Linen  x3 €37,50
Grey cotton x0,25 €2,13
Each of the prints x0,5 €4,50

These come in three versions and are available in my Ravelry store.

I’m slowly getting started with Erik’s quilt. I first tried to draw the hexagons myself, but only had some black card around. It has so much texture that the graphite point in my compass gets worn off immediately and all accuracy is lost. So I just drew some hexagon grids in Illustrator and printed them on regular paper.

I made grids with hexagons 5, 6 and 7 cm wide (edge to edge). I am using the smallest grid for my paper piecing, the largest to cut my fabric, and the medium one will probably be the grid for my quilt.

So I printed several sheets of the 5 cm grid, cut out the hexagons with scissors, punched a hole in the middle, and, when Erik gives me a little bit of free time, I cut and baste some hexagons.

I saw the punched hole trick on Pinterest and it works very nicely. Here I placed one hexagon of each fabric (each I had at the time!) on top of the 7 cm grid, and I like it enough.

So yes, I got some more fabric :) I have been browsing websites looking for basic tools, and in cottonpatch.co.uk I found some great matches, so I got a quarter metre of each of them:

I think they’re great! My previous grey fabrics were all very neutral except the birds, which lean a little blue. Now from these, the dark lined one is also pretty neutral, but the light lined also leans blue, the roses lean prussian and the forest print leans warm. And the new yellows are also all over the place. I think it’s still allright, though. I was happy to finally find a couple of fabrics with both grey and yellow. The picture at the top of the post shows all fabrics together.

I’ve been making digital versions of the prints in Illustrator (using image files slowed my computer down too much) and trying different designs for the quilt. I tried tumblers, arrows, triangles and hexagons. I’m staying with hexagons. Now that I have new fabrics, I have to digitise these and come up with a more definitive design, more on that later.

So, apart from splurging a little bit on fabric (that’s what the quilt is about, after all), I am trying to keep the tool purchase minimal, I am aways agonising about such things!

The batting, and since it is a small quilt I went for the most luxurious, a mid-loft blend of silk, tencel, bamboo and cotton. I’ll have to test if it is too lofty, though, it may be.

I also got two marking implements: a Clover chaco liner in grey and a Quilter’s choice silver pencil, I will report how these work. Due to the triangle grid I have to work on, what I am most apprehensive about is marking the grid and being accurate on the base fabric. I also got my first quilting ruler, an Omnigrip 8,5 x 12 inches. Yes I went for inches instead of metric :O it has marks for 45 and 60 degrees, the latter will come in handy for the hexagons. I already have a rotary cutter, but who knows where it is, probably still in a box somewhere, I haven’t seen it in a long time.
Also got some thin and long flower head pins and nice thread.

Oh, and cotton fusible interfacing. The original yellow fabric I got is very thin (it is also shot taffeta! first time I notice this in a cotton, it is not changeable like a shot silk is; this one is yellow and orange, which gives it this beautiful deep warm yellow), so anyhow, it is a bit sheer and you can see the fabric folded under, so I got this interfacing for it. I’ll have to test it first.

So now I am only lacking the base fabric and I’ll be all set. I have my mind on an off-white linen, preferably with a little texture and sheen, for contrast. Let’s see if I can find what I want.

On a side note… yesterday I visited a local store that I have been meaning to for years and years! Hexagoon in the Ravenstraat. Among the tons of scrapbooking materials they also have lots of haberdashery bits which I did not expect, and a nice selection of printed cottons. This one was expensive (21 euro / m), but I could not leave without one metre:

I’m afraid I am already planning my next quilt, how about this?

For my reference, prices of the new fabrics:
Makower Linea Sunshine £2.75
Sun Prints Fabric: Link on Citrus £2.75
Makower Linea Ebony Fabric £2.75
Little House on the Prairie Fabric: Vines on Vintage Blue £2.85
Makower Linea Heron Grey Fabric £2.75
Sleep Tight Fabric: Forest Scene on Grey £3.70

I got it in my head to make a quilt for Erik, by the time he moves into his own room/needs bedding, which will still take months. His room is now light grey and white, with natural oak floors (the oil and blonde shellac deepened and warmed the shade up). I’ll keep the colour scheme grey, white and I will add warm yellow and darker grey to it. So the quilt should be in this scheme. Here I have an inspiration Pinterest board for his bedroom (colours and other stuff).

I’ll go for a crib sized quilt (110 x 125). His crib can be used as a small bed until age 4-6 (depending on growth). A smaller quilt will serve first for the crib, then as a lap blanket or mat to play on. It is also a manageable smaller size for my first quilt.

I also thought of making it reversible, with a play side. Could be roads and houses or a forest/countryside setting. Either piecing/appliqué or finding a suitable fabric, which would be more straight forward, but I am very picky with prints.

I’m gathering inspiration in this Pinterest board.

I may make some other quilts, but I don’t expect to make many. This is yet another side project thing ;)

So, my mission is to gather all the useful information I can and make a decent quilt from the get go. Ahaha :D I don’t want an overly complicated quilt and sort of know how to sew, so that’s something. On the other hand I am impatient and not very precise, so this is perhaps just what I need to eliminate these negative characteristics (hahaha).

I’m gathering info and collecting it into a post.

As usual impatience got the best of me and so I visited two shops in the centre (isn’t it convenient that my favourite yarn store also has quilting fabric and notions?). I found a few fabrics in the colour scheme I am going for. This is probably already more than enough fabric for the top, probably even the binding, but I still have to play with it digitally to see if I can come up with a design I like with just these, or if I want to add more.

The warm yellow is just perfect! I bought everything they had which was just three fat quarters and a bit. Clockwise from top centre: 1/2m of yellow daisy, grey daisy, a tiny print that looks like plant cells in dark grey, light grey birds, plain graphite, three+ fat quarters of plain goldenrod, 1/4m of a geometric grey print, 1/2m of a light grey version of the “plant cell” fabric (centre image). I am already very happy with this selection, we’ll see what I come up with.

For my reference: fabrics 1, 2, 5 & 7 = 9.38 euro; 3, 4, 6 & 8 = 36.74 (WTF right).

So I am just assembling information in preparation for my first quilt. This is a work in progress.

Batting

Polyester as usual is touted as being easy to launder. However, no reasons given why cotton is not also easy to launder. And even some wool batting seems easy to launder and even tumble dry. In any case, before using a particular kind of batting, a sample can be made and laundered? And obviously wool is more insulating than cotton while remaining breathable (unlike poly). To me it is a no-brainer: either cotton or wool.

Then there’s thickness/loftiness and hand, which is a choice. If using natural fibres, for loft wool is needed. There is at least one 80% cotton / 20% wool batting out there, which also seems like a good idea.

Outer fabric

I suppose many types of fabric can be used, but quilting cotton is primarily used. Quilting cotton (plain weave) is supposed to be crisp, have a relatively high density, be colourfast and durable, and not distort easily, so it is a good option for piecing and years of laundering.

Binding

Quilters appear to use bindings on the grain most often. The backing fabric folded over can also be used, but this seems to produce less neat corners, although I am sure they can be neatly mitred in some way.

Tricks

Press: (As usual with nearly any sewing, in fact) press all steps of the way.

Glue: I’ve seen PVA and stick glue used. Set with iron. Helps size for crispness before sewing, and also obviously holds in place. It is supposed to wash off when laundering. To test. Some PVA glues are waterproof. Children’s PVA might be a safer bet.

Marking: There’s those washable or fading markers, but some people report them not washing away or reappearing, which is also my experience. They’re also expensive and dry out. Another option is low graphite pencils which erase and wash off. To test. Chalk and soap I don’t find very precise.

Sequences: Clever sewing and cutting sequences can add precision and reduce measuring, cutting and sewing operations. These are dependent on pattern so I don’t think there are any general guidelines.

Design: There are many named traditional patterns. Regardless of this, and of fashions, choice of pattern, colour scheme and prints clearly overlaps with any other design work (I mean once you learn this, you don’t need to re-learn for every craft).

Precision is utterly paramount, necessary if the patch work is to fit at all. Especial rulers and rotary cutters / mats are advised.

Basting all layers together before quilting. I’ve gone over several techniques and basting with thread and herringbone st seems the most obviously superior to me. Video here. First video of my quilting playlist on youTube.

These are pictures straight from the book. I may translate or rework them at a later date, but this is it for now. There are other cool patterns and engravings.

Images are clickable. You can add them to your Ravelry library.

Men’s stocking, alternative replaceable heel and sole as pictured above follow below:

…

My first baby pattern is published!

I published the newborn size (0-3 months) of this cardigan pattern for free :) another pattern is available with two additional sizes. All in all it covers 0-12 months.

A cabled braid adds interest to the centre front. It closes with snaps, and pretty buttons can be sewn on top. The inner snap band is wide, so you can move the snaps a bit further when your baby grows.

Sizes
S 0-3 months, M 4-7 months, and L 8-12 months.
Wear can be extended due to the extra wide snap band.

Skills
Intermediate skills: casting on, knitting, purling, simple cabling (from chart or written instructions), increasing, decreasing, knitting in the round (for the sleeves), binding off.
Knitting two sleeves at the same time (optional).

What you’ll need
4mm (US 6) circular needle. The body can be knit with straight needles.
200 {260} 360 metres / 220 {285} 395 yards of DK yarn.
A cabling needle, a tapestry needle.
Three to eight medium clear snaps.
The same or a smaller amount of buttons (optional).
12 stitch markers or loops of yarn. Preferably 2 pink, 4 green, 4 blue and 2 orange.
Two bits of cotton yarn or stitch holders for the sleeves.

Anyway. I’ve been mainly working on finishing old UFOs (of which I still have a million) and… I suppose a layette for the baby (you probably need a Ravelry account for this link to work). All these small items are very satisfying, small amount of yarn, instant gratification, and easy to design something on the go, too.

I made up a couple of patterns and I’ll probably publish them. I’m making this little gallery to which I’ll add things as I finish them. To see what patterns I used, you better visit the link above and do that through Ravelry. If i publish anything, I’ll for sure post about it again.

Bind off

Which brings me to the BOs. I have knitted a few toe up socks, and I suppose other things where I needed an elastic BO on ribbing, but I actually never had a problem making my BO in pattern loose enough, with the same needles, I just adapt my tension. It doesn’t look particularly pretty, it kind of flares off, but that is not noticeable when worn. This has made me lazy to try other BOs, I tend to stick to both the long tail CO and the regular BO (always in pattern though).

As I was knitting a pair of booties (these are super cute BTW), for some reason I decided I wanted to try a different BO.

I tried the… I don’t find a name for it. SSK/p2tog type of BO. In this one, you work in pattern and you work the last two sts again (in the pattern of the last st you worked) with a ssk or p2tog.

I also now want to try the Russian BO. You p2tog, loosely, put the st back, p2tog again… I tried it on the bootie for a few sts and it seems to look nice.

Other things I may want to try: sewn (kitchener) BO (perhaps better on 1×1 than 2×2 from what I read); sewn BO after a couple of tubular rows (knit the knits and slip the purls with yarn in front); suspended BO.

I also have to try the tubular CO one of these days.

This post brought to you by four-in-the-morning-my-back-aches-and-im-hungry.

I have a project for some 50 cards which I wanted to make by hand, my deadline is about 3 months from now (I’m not good with deadlines, but I suppose this is more than enough time). They’ll have a little calligraphy, but I also wanted to add an illustration, possibly spreading on to the envelopes. I thought it was a good project to try my hand at linoleum printing.

I have done a little engraving on copper before, and that’s the extent of my engraving experience. Somehow I had never set hands on a piece of linoleum.

About three weeks ago I got some supplies: brown and grey linoleum sheets, a cheap engraving set (Abig), a roller (Essdee), inks (Schminke aqua linoprint), some paper (Fabriano Murillo 360g in oliva and Fabriano Tiziano 160g in pistacchio – probably not the best choices since they’re textured), and some envelopes (Crown mill, laid). I also got extra calligraphy nibs and regular ink, since mine have dried out. And some extra gouache.
I’m using an old picture frame with its glass to spread the ink onto.
Last week I also got a couple of wooden drawer pulls/knobs that I’ll use to burnish by hand, since I don’t have a press (more on that later) but meanwhile I’ve been using the back of a wooden spoon.

First thing I did was sharpen the engraving “nibs”. I expect all new tools to be somewhat dull, especially when they’re cheap, and these were really as bad as expected if not worse, burrs and all. As long as the steel is decent enough, no harm done I guess.

I also found three old knife tools in a drawer. One broke when I was sharpening, not impressed. The steel is brittle all the way through and it snapped, the others survived due to the curved shape, I suppose. But those had even worse edges, so much material to remove… and I didn’t do a very good job of it, so they kind of suck at the moment. I’m doing fine with the Abig set, though.

And so I’ve been making some small tests now and then. Doodling, cutting and printing on some textured all-media paper… which I discovered is not a best choice. I wanted the texture of the paper, but I may have to end up printing on the smooth side.

Some things I have learnt:

• You do need a roller.
• Linoleum is in great part cured lineseed oil, and it will continue curing. So there is such a thing as fresh linoleum, and if not fresh it will harden too much. Don’t stock up.
• I prefer grey to brown linoleum. It seems a bit softer bit has good definition.
• You can make a great burnisher with two wooden knobs (see left).
• The pricy Schminke cleaner seems to be just ethanol and water, so I am using regular window cleaning spray (methanol based) and it works very well to clean roller, glass, and the lino too.
• Cutting too deep may mean one of the edges of the tool ends up under the surface of the linoleum as you cut, and it will tear.
• Unless you’re used to it, I suppose, after cutting for a while your hand and arms gets tired. Taking a rest is best because a tired arm is not very precise.
• Not unlike enamel, dirt, hair and dust are to be avoided, they’ll create irregularities on the print. Before inking, brush the linoleum surface with a stiff brush to remove any loose bits.
• The people on the internet that say that linocut is “slow and tedious” in all likelihood have never enamelled ;) I find it entertaining and actually very fast. Remember you’re getting a whole series at the end of it.

Today, I think, I have decided on a design. I made some tests but the linocut still needs some details and I’ve run out of daylight.

To be continued…

For the last few months I have not been participating as fully into the work as I used to be, because I am pregnant and that does affect your physical performance ;) and it doesn’t look like I am gonna have a lot of free time anytime soon either ;)

Renovation blog

I am not going to start posting about the renovation here, I document that in a blogger blog: 1935 renovation notes. But… don’t you want to see something now and then? I do try to put some of my “artistic sense”, whatever that may be, into the house. Pim certainly puts lots of his engineering background into the bones of it.

So I’ll be showing a room now and then as they are finished, which will not be often. We’ll all wait for the workshop and a return to more creative pursuits ;) Right now, only the bathroom is, for the time being, finished. There’s always something, right? There’s the door to fix up a bit, and a curtain to knit (I know), and perhaps a few other little things. Oh and I am looking for some seating, I am stubbornly determined to find something like what you see on the left.

But it is practically finished, so I present to you:

We do always get nice comments when people see it for the first time:

In the broadest terms, the construction of the bathroom entailed: removing a brick and marble mantlepiece, partially re-plastering the walls which were damaged, insulating walls, bringing water and drainage to the first floor (there wasn’t any), reinforcing of the floor supporting beams, tiling, which was more complex than might seem since our tiles were of two different thicknesses (see left), waterproofing the shower area, more tiling, installing heating and antique furniture, installing a toilet (very daunting!), a bathtub and a shower, plumbing onto antique furniture, and all the little detailing! If you want to see all bathroom related entries, there’s like three pages of them here. A couple of fun before and afters are here.

Sourcing

We sourced materials for the bathroom from all over Europe :) The floor tiles are from France (the recycled vintage tiles, the mistletoe ones, from the turn of the 20th century, we believe are also French, and were sourced in Belgium). The enamelled shower plate and the wall lamps are German. The composite material bathtub, the toilet and the radiator are British. The radiator taps are Czech. The antique art deco oak furniture was made in Jodoigne (Belgium), not too far from where we live, in the interbellum period. The brass taps and towel rails and the sink are Italian, and so is the windowsill and shower niche marble, which is Carrara, as is the original washstand counter. The switches and outlets (for the entire house) are Catalan.

We did a lot of research to find the right stuff!

Use and comfort

All in all, we really enjoyed planning and researching every little detail so that the bathroom would be well made, long-lasting and comfortable while still looking the way we wanted. We enjoyed working on it, too. I discovered I love tiling! well… the hexagons are a bit frustrating at times ;) but as such things are, also rewarding. We saved a lot of money doing everything ourselves, and, funnily enough, using antique furniture instead of new. We could then spend some of the money we saved on awesome bits like the radiator and the bathtub.

Most importantly, in the last two years, since the bathroom became functional, we found that it is super comfortable to use. I had a concern that such a large bathroom (it is 12 m²) would feel cold and inhospitable. It is not so, the wooden furniture warms up the room, and there is only a slight amount of echo remaining now, which I intend to get rid of by hanging a lace curtain sometime in the future. The insulation and heating help make it a comfortably warm room in winter (the shower curtain, which was a later addition, also helps a lot when you’re wet). We do not like a very warm house, however… just comfortable. In winter, we keep the first floor (bathroom and bedroom) between 17 and 19 °C. Downstairs we aim for 20 °C when we are home, we set the thermostat to 17 °C when we are not and during the night – due to the insulation, it cools down very slowly, so it rarely reaches 17 °C. We air daily.

We haven’t had a single indication of mould or movement on the solid oak furniture due to humidity (and we still hang our clothes to dry in there!). We are not door closing type of people, the door only gets closed when someone wants privacy. In winter, we always crack the window open while we take a shower: with the insulation, the room remains surprisingly comfortable, some warm air escapes, but the walls and floor have no time at all to cool down in 15 minutes. If I notice an extraordinary amount of vapour, I open the window completely for a couple of minutes and it is gone.

In summer, the window remains cracked open nearly always, we have mosquito nets and the windows have a system to secure them in the open position you see in the photos. Having a window in the bathroom really is a life-changer in such a rainy country as Belgium.

We also keep a squeegee in the shower and use it on glass and tiles after every shower, which reduces the amount of cleaning enormously! Granted, the water softener system also helps in this area of extremely hard water.

Taps

Some people might wonder what’s up with the taps. I suppose due to my training as enameller with some metalworking thrown in, I just like brass. You’d think copper would be best, and perhaps it would – although I like brass with white and green -, but copper cannot be (or is not) used to make taps out of, and I did not want a coating.
Knowing there is beautiful solid brass under all that chrome saddens me, I have to say (and do not think that the chrome layer lasts forever, either). I know brass turns dark and green and messy, but I like the patina. I am glad the Italians agree and have these available! Sometimes I scrub the washbasin tap to make it shinier in the high spots, because I also like that. And I like when it weathers again and becomes spotty and, a bit green! I like a changeable material that ages like we do. I sooo love them and do not regret it at all!

It took some convincing Pim to get untreated brass taps (and a brass radiator), but I think he’s growing to like them too. The steampunk touch helps ;) I am content with these, so we’ll get another type for the kitchen.

I’m back to the workshop after an hiatus. I’ve had back problems for a long time, but in February I realised I would not be able to just up and get into woodworking with hand tools in my current condition. It hurt.

I’m no spring chicken either so things are only downhill from here, at least if I do nothing.

I decided to get a gym subscription, I have a small gym next door so that’s convenient. I hesitated for a long time since I have a long commute and this is only gonna cut my free time even further, but I could not continue this way.

It’s now been more than 4,5 months of weight training about twice a week. After two months I could already dig in the garden for several hours at a time, while before that I couldn’t dig out a single clump of grass. With the frenzy of spring I’ve mostly spent my weekends working outside.

I also noticed an increase in energy levels, and I could discontinue my vertigo medication and the magnesium I took for muscle spasms. Now the energy levels have gone down a little from the antihistamines I’m taking for my newfound hay fever (wtf), which I’m already weaning off.

So today I decided I had the time and motivation to go upstairs and work a bit with wood.

First I spent some time restoring my new (old) Record No.5. The tote and knob are shellacked and firmly on and I’ve made good progress shaping the blade which was in really ugh condition. I tired of that, I find it a very hard job. My upper body is very small and my jewellery bench where I’m sharpening is tall, so even standing on some stuff I can’t really put much strength and weight on it. It’s enough to make my forearms and fingers complain though. So I left that for the day and moved on to the workbench.

I spent several hours planning away and piling shavings around my ankles. I’ve done a terrible job of it to be honest, but I hope this is good practice. At least the blade of my wooden jack plane is at a point where I can easily sharpen it and it works very well. It’s gonna be a shabby workbench, and half the wood I bought is gonna end up as shavings, but if anything in the house can be shabby, it’s the workbench I suppose. It just needs to be sturdy, heavy and end up flat and level. Right?

I only got to glue two worktop boards together and there’s gaps. I swear it looked better during the glue rehearsal. How lame.

First thing I managed to actually finish (I confess I like cutting but am not a fan of sewing itself, prolly because I suck at it), is a copy of that dress, in some wool/poly (sorry, I normally hate and don’t buy poly but I wanted jersey with wool and this is all I could find D:), so I actually didn’t buy it for summer? It dawned 2°C this morning anyway, so all is right with the world. I have some craptastic phone pictures with absolutely fabulous backdrops. Some dreadful selfies. I might get better ones, I might not…

I made the panniers a little smaller to not waste tons of fabric, they just didn’t fit in the width. I cut some narrower, 3/4 sleeves because of idem. Then I realised that this dress has huge gaping armscyes (and the corresponding sleeves almost look like dolman, they’re also 3/4). And that in this very drapey and elastic fabric it has HUGE GAPING ARMSCYES. Was about to cut new sleeves, or some gussets, when I had the crazy idea of sewing them in upside down? to like cover the armpit gap with the sleeve cap, yo? Amazingly enough this worked. I still cut new sleeves, because I decided it was silly to have a warmer version of this dress with 3/4 sleeves. So I cut super long sleeves that reach like my knees. And I set them in upside-down. Because I can.

It looks totally retarded (or happy?) when the dress is flat on the table. When it is on, you couldn’t tell. But if you look closely, it is a little weird in the armpit. And the seam is on top of the arm. If I do this again, I’ll also try to move the seam to the top (bottom).

Couple of “milestones” in this dress for me. First time I realise that sewing straight stitch with a double needle makes an elastic seam. DUH. Is it because the shuttle thread makes a sort of zig-zag on the back? plus it looks nice-ish. Helps that I got a new double, stretch needle (I am very horrible at changing needles). First time I also do a binding in jersey. I cut it with the grain running vertically (so several rows of knit) and ironed it folded it half before I pinned it on the edge. I didn’t fold the edge underneath like for woven, the edge is just raw. I didn’t want the bulk. And I didn’t dare.

It is far from perfect but I am very proud of myself. Of course I just cut the jersey raw at “hem” and “cuffs” as per my usual.

More soon, if I don’t screw it all up.

I registered enamelworkshop.com some time ago (and tallerdesmalt.cat as well! I could not resist, always wanted a .cat…) but I had it redirect here.

Yesterday I decided to create a landing page and a new Newsletter list for it. And a logo! And a few layout examples… That’s all for now, since I still do not have a workshop, we’re still in full house renovation mode for the moment, but it is getting closer :)

So when I have news, which will still be a long time, in addition to update the website and probably also here in my blog, I will send out a newsletter, so if you are interested…

subscribe!

I’ve been messing with the Record No 4 ever since I got it from eBay a year ago. Not constantly of course. It was a cheap lot of two No 4 and one 4 1/2, the other two are Stanleys and are more recent, with dreadful plastic handles. I think they’re all missing pieces… when I finally figured out what was missing, I cannibalised the Stanley and this one is now complete, I think ;P The blades were in dreadful condition and it’s taken me a long time to figure out sharpening and setting to the point that now I can have it take sort of even, thin shavings. Although I think I still need much more practice sharpening (to be expected).

First thing I did today is have a brief look at the sharpening plate holder I made yesterday (in desperation I spray painted it black before I went to bed) and toss it into the scrap pile. I didn’t feel like starting over right away so I’ve been banging my head against the try square instead. I’m making it out of oak floorboard cut offs, because that’s all I have. They are almost 2 cm thick but have nasty deep grooves on one side. I already resawed two pieces some time ago, which was a pain in the ass. The largest pain in the ass for every single thing I do right now is that I have no way of holding anything. I’m using clamps in admittedly not very inventive ways.

For the very thin blade part of the try square, I’ve gotten to sticking it to the table with double sided tape. I found it very difficult to plane it thin and even and square. I don’t have even close to so much trouble planing the workbench top. Is it because it’s thin? because it’s oak? jeez. I was getting frustrated as usual with this thing, and decided to stop and clean up and sharpen the skew rabbet plane I got some time ago in the flea market for 5€. Because.

I scraped it all well, sanded a bit, oiled the wood, and sharpened the blade. The wedge is some sort of mahogany or sapeli, the body is beech with a beautiful knot in it, do yourself a favour and click to embiggen the photo up here of the partly-oiled knot. It’s pretty.
This took me quite a bit of time and it was very rewarding, particularly because PRETTY, which is what I needed, instant gratification ;P

But then I took it to the thin blade of oak, and in fact I could sort of flatten it with this totally inappropriate tool (?? was it the skew blade?). It was by then already very thin (which it has to be since the stock is also quite thin) so some of the marks I made with the No4 I cannot remove without making it transparent. I already had a hard time unsticking it from the table without breaking it (sigh). Now there’s also screwdriver marks on the other side, yay! I hope I can steam those off. I had to use a cabinet scraper to smoothen it, I couldn’t get any other tool to not make more mess than anything on the surface. Is it because THE ENTIRE TABLE WHERE I’M WORKING WOBBLES?? who knows. I should just concentrate on the workbench and save myself some grief.

So I just moved on to cutting a fancy shape on the end of the blade. Because. My first time using a coping saw (I have a lot of experience using a jeweler’s saw though, and this is so thin I could have used just that).

Also sawed the slot for the blade on the stock, which I have no idea how I’m gonna clean up and even out, left it at that for now.

I think I also haven’t mentioned the last few thing’s I’ve gotten for the workshop. From fine-tools.de: Pegas coping saw + 18 TPI blades, a rip cut blade for a bow saw which I still plan to make (again out of floorboard cut offs), a protractor (which makes an appearance in the photo of the shaving up there) and a Veritas crosscut carcass backsaw. Pim also got me a Thor 31.712r chisel hammer with the ash handle in his latest order from amazon UK*. The Veritas saw (which is awesome, if the handle too big for my hands as usual) and the protractor (to check how off I am when sharpening) already have been very useful these last couple of weeks.

*he got two Nest smoke and CO detectors, and one is already installed in the workshop :)

The knobs have a layer of drying oil, two layers of blonde shellac and a little wax. Removed rust and various shite, sanded the bottom on a granite surface a little, softened the edges a bit with sandpaper, polished the brass screws which looks nice. I think they’re only plated on top though, shouldn’t polish too often.

I did not follow these instructions. I just made the thing. I left 2cm between plates. I started well, but then got sloppy. I see that holder all the time in the videos, and I assumed the cuts went all the way because of cutting with a backsaw like for a housing, but now I see it’s from a table saw. Huh, well I don’t have one. I see that it could have been made neater by hand omitting the saw altogether (I thought of it but then decided I do not know better, which indeed I don’t). I marked with knife, did the knife wall thing with a chisel and then used a carcass saw to mark the edges and the depth. Then I used the router to get all the wood out. It was my first time doing all of these things. My first housing was the best (center), the next a bit worse (right) and the last quite dreadful. The first time I went very careful, the second I wanted to see if the plywood peeled off per layer as well as it looked, and it did, so I went much faster. For the last I wanted to see how far I could push it, I think I only changed depth on the router two times. I guess it’s good to know where the limits are. I say to myself ;) Maybe it was just back pain increasing and I’m rationalising it. I need a very tall workbench, which will probably happen anyway because I’m a hobbit.

I also popped the corners with a chisel to see how that goes. Easier than I thought, still looks like shit ;) The plywood is the cheapest I could find, poplar, which is super soft and mushy. On the bright side it is very light and I do not need to make things heavier. My edges are a mess, but anyway this is a functional and practice piece, right? To be fair this stuff gets scratched and dented just looking at it. I gave it several layers of garnet shellac (what I had softened a brush for at the moment, since I was also giving some coats to the No4’s handle and knob) to make it a little more water resistant. I’m sloppy though, that’s something I need to work more on, and this was not a good exercise in this respect.

So, a couple of weeks ago I got a piece of plywood (for this thing up there and some other stuff I have in mind) and some extra wood for the workbench. There was something about the workbench. Let me check…  6 pieces 19×100 mm and 3 pieces 27X69 mm. I think the idea was the 6 to reinforce the aprons (in width) and the 3 to laminate with the other pieces for the legs and for the tenon thingies. Not sure that’s enough if so. I’ll see when I get to that point.

Now my sciatica hurts and I’m off to I don’t know what.

I made this small collection in 2012, specifically for the Femme Fatale exhibition at Nova Belgica Art Gallery.

My inspiration, in retrospect, I suppose is 19th century posters such as this one by Louis Raemaekers.
And much of Symbolism, some of Baudelaire, and lots of Rops, one of my favourites (1, 2, 3). And as usual, who knows what ;)

These are all vitreous enamels over copper set into textiles. I dyed some of them. Stitched some by hand, some by machine. The embroidery is all by hand. I wanted a little of the “feminine” needle arts of the 19th century in there.

Many of my Skull series pieces belong in my Black series as well, but not all… see more process pictures etc by browsing the Skull tag.

Mist is probably my most esteemed collection of work. I adore fog and mist, as it creates a cocoon around you, makes all sound intimate, and the entire world becomes your inner shelter. It also incorporates many of my most cherished elements: tree outlines, subtle shades of grey, opalescence, depth, understatement. Due to their subtlety, these pieces are difficult to photograph and best appreciated in person.

It all began with a rather unremarkable tree in a sea of opalescent mist, perhaps a clumsy first attempt, but which sold immediately nonetheless. With the next piece, Mist II (left), I fully developed this idea into what the collection now is. Opalescent enamel always plays a part in this series, either in the backgrounds or overlapping trees and branches. Despite their apparent simplicity at first sight, the depth in these pieces is created by a complex process of layering. They incorporate all types of enamel: opalescent, transparent, opaque, and vitrifiable pigments both between and on top of the layers of enamel. The placement of all these different components in the right order creates real depth in the piece.

In most pieces I begin by covering the background metal with an opaque enamel, since a shiny bright metal base would distract from the theme, but there are notable exceptions like Mist XIX here at right, in which I took advantage of the warm shine of the copper base to illustrate the effect of a setting sun in a city’s sky partially filled with low fog and steam.

What’s interesting to me when developing this series with enamel, which is glass, is that I am not merely attempting to visually reproduce the impression of the perceived colour & light as a painter would, but I am literally employing the same physical effects that occur as light is diffused through the atmosphere and  low clouds.

The same effect that makes the sky blue and the sunset red, Rayleigh scattering (in solids), is at play here passing through layers of opalescent glass and transparent glass and finally reaching an opaque layer or a glinting copper surface. I find there’s a sort of poetry in this equivalence.

You can find a gallery of selected pieces below, and if you scroll all the way to the bottom of the page, you will find an archive with all pieces in this series that I have created to date, a few in process images, and you can find more details under the series’ tag.

All pieces in this series:

Mist IX

Enamel over copper, sterling silver, onyx (on Mist II necklace).

Many of these also belong to the Skull series, for obvious reasons… for more details and some WIP pictures, browse the Black series’ tag.

Wondering if any of these are available to purchase? send me an email at innershelter@gmail.com

Skull XIII is one of my favourites from the entire series. I’ve kept it and I wear it all the time

I have kept most of it private as an archive (still deciding what to do with the original, which is also mostly friends locked), but I have made the enamel entries public. I had a lot of stuff there that I hope will be enough to replace an actual website ;) now I have to go through whatever enamel stuff I was too lazy to post in a blog, to be lost in the hit-and-mostly-miss mists of Facebook. I’ll be posting that directly ;) There is some stuff:

Enamel over copper (transparent enamel over white opalescent enamel and china paint) sterling/fine silver setting and sterling chain.

It was actually finished in May 2014 but I misplaced the image. It was one of the pieces mentioned here. This is in the Mist series

I’m basing the build on Paul Seller’s workbench video series, but the dimensions of the lumber are different over here, and our space is relatively small, so the workbench will be smaller.

We managed to find mostly straight stock. The pieces for the worktop are 6 x 7 cm, for the aprons and the rails, 3 x 9,5 (too thin for the apron…), the bearers 3 x 7, and the well board 2 x 19 (we’re not laminating it but using a solid board). That leaves the legs. We could use the 6 x 7, but that seems too thin. I am thinking of laminating them with 3 x 7, to have 7 x 9. Doubling them (12 x 7) seems excessive.
I could also laminate the apron pieces to double the thickness, to 6 x 9,5, perhaps a little bit too thick for this smallish bench. We’re missing some pieces so we’ll have to look what else is available.

I laid the worktop pieces on a desk to see how the proportions look:

It’ll be about 1,80 m long, and I decided to use 4 pieces of 6 x 7 for each half of worktop, instead of the 5 we originally intended, since that made the bench too square-ish, and this is a good size for our space. I put two of the apron pieces on the edges to see how wide the whole thing gets, but those have to be laminated vertically also, 3 pieces.

I started preparing the sides of the stock, planing the roughness and dirt off, just a bit because they were quite flat, rehearsed the clamping and then glued. I probably could have done a better job, but hey it’s my first time.

Two of the worktop pieces (I am using one on each half) are of a different wood. I think the rest of the wood is some sort of fir, and these two are a type of red pine (Scots pine?). They’re denser, less papery, and smell very resinous when planed. I think it is the same wood that was used on the doors throughout our house (in the 30’s). These are a little bit larger and so stick out after laminating. This and some unevenness caused quite pronounced steps, particularly on the side that will be the bottom.

Today I unclamped and started planing these off. I was expecting it to be very hard work (I am not strong, have back problems and my sharpening and plane set-up leaves much to be desired), but it went by faster and easier than I expected. I only did a bit, then stopped since I cannot keep at it for long, I plan on doing a little bit each day. I am using my Record No. 5.

Meanwhile I hope my sharpening skills improve. Some of the hard knots even put dents on the edge!

We also went to the Science Museum where we visited two more temporary exhibitions: Julia Margaret Cameron (no photos) and Churchill’s Scientists. And we also visited the Kew gardens (which I loved!).

I’ll post a few pictures of enamelled pieces or interesting details in jewellery and metalwork. These are from the Celts exhibition:

And some enamelled watches, keys and fobs from the watch collection at the Science Museum:

I am establishing a new tradition, for the second time this year: a free pattern to celebrate the start of Autumn and more knitting :)

I love to see the different ways folks interpret my patterns, so I would really like if you’d make a project with pics for these in Ravelry! ;)

The mittens are modular, knit them mixing and matching two different cuffs and top edgings.
Gusseted thumb. Canicule is the matching shawl pattern:

So I installed a WordPress site, and a theme, and haven’t actually customised it much. I don’t want to spend the time. I found a way to import my blogger blog into WordPress, which was brilliant, and then I realised some pictures in the oldest posts are missing. I found out these were still hosted in some folders that I used to use for my Livejournal. I should upload them back to my server.
Perhaps I should look into also importing my Livejournal entries, although I am sure that’d be messier.

So now the gallery part of my website is actually gone. I have to go through the files and see what and how I can put up some sort of slideshow or portfolio feature, but as for future updates I’ll probably mostly rely on the blog updates.

Meanwhile – workshop is still not up. That will take a while. There will probably be more woodworking than enamel or knitting coming in the future.

My greatest concern is to buy the wrong things, or to buy things in un-refurnishable condition. Since I have little idea and less experience, this is always a possibility. I try to do a lot of research before I make my choices and then a lot of and digging in order to get what looks like a good tool for a fair price.

Right now I cannot focus on woodworking proper since we have more urgent things to do, and we are on a schedule to get them done before the winter (we should have the back building sort of emptied and the windows and heating installed before it starts freezing – it’s a lot of work) but already we’ve been able to use some of the new tools in the home renovation. And I do hope to squeeze building a workbench somewhere in there, but if it has to wait until winter, so be it, the workshop is a very cosy room (in fact, in the middle of a heatwave at the moment, it is not particularly pleasant).

I’ve scraped the paint off the front door (and I found green goo underneath) and am also fixing a spare door we found in the attic to install it in the attic bedroom.

I painted the areas I didn’t feel like scraping, laaazy They really weren’t in good condition

On the front door I started testing a few card scrapers I got, it has a lot of mouldings (see link above) so I got different shapes.

I you look closely you’ll see I have already altered two profiles

This took me on a journey to get them sharpened properly, which was my little odyssey (it still is). Finally I got everything I needed: a mill file (I really did not want to buy yet another file, but it does make a difference), 3 diamond sharpening plates (coarse, fine and superfine; this was ouch, but am convinced a very solid and necessary purchase), a really hard burnisher (I could go on about my burnisher frustrations, this one works); so I am getting there. I need a little more practice. It would have been difficult to justify such expense just to sharpen the scrapers, but all these things are also necessary to sharper other tools. And all the tools need sharpening…

I also got the small sharpeners “To save on shipping”, I’m sure you’ve heard that before ;)

Comparison of a double cut (top), and a single cut file (bottom)

Just this week I received a Record 080 cabinet scraper. I needed something heavier to remove the paint and varnish from these doors. At least I hoped it did the work… even after my first inept sharpening session (with all proper tools this time) it performed brilliantly! first clear win in this adventure :D

This is joy! I hate sanding

Record 080 with a pretty good blade

It seems it belonged to a Ray

I’ve also been trying to get the most basic equipment, and my main goal is to get the best tools I can afford, so I do not have to buy them twice: I have too little space available and too many interests (and a limited budget) to go on tool collecting for collecting’s sake.

We also are building a frame for the door in the bedroom attic. We have no idea what we are doing but it is taking shape nonetheless.

We cut some housings for the top “beam” and for the door hinges. I cut one housing for the “joint”, and Pim cut everything else while I was busy with the door.

From the tool list below, I already had the AI chisels, but not the router plane, so we did all this with a chisel (which I didn’t sharpen yet because they came pretty sharp and I want to have more practice on cheaper chisels before I ruin these), and the marking the best we could with my steel ruler and flat metalworking square from the jewellery bench (less than ideal).

Anyway, the point of the story is that after cutting these housings Pim said: “This is a lot of fun”. You have to understand that Pim is the king of understatement. I’m still giddy about it! it will be great if he also develops an interest.

So, apart from the things I mentioned in the previous post, I went on a workshop-equipping frenzy :) the holiday pay helped ;) I’ll make a list with pictures because I can and because no one reads this anyway ;D in no particular order:

Ashley Iles chisels (1/4, 1/2, 3/4)

A box with three chisels and three files (sigh) from Aldi

1/4″, 10mm, 12mm, 1/2″, 18mm, 3/4″, 25mmA couple of these are closer than I thought when I bought the box (12mm and 1/2, 18mm and 3/4, I’m not good at imperial)

So now I have 7 chisels, and I hope this is enough for years and years! who am I kidding.

Guess which handles might not last

And check out how lithe the Ashley Iles’ chisels are:

Top to bottom, Stanley, Aldi, Ashley Iles

Sooo, why did I buy three very fancy chisels and three Aldi chisels? (I had the Stanley since 2008 – trying to re-sharpen it, someone took it to some concrete… grr). I’ve actually been reading very good things about Aldi/Lidl chisels, but after being subscribed to their newsletters for months and months, I gave up ever seeing them surface. I ordered the Ashley Iles chisels. Guess what? like two weeks later I saw the chisel/file box in the newsletter. I checked it out, it was 30€… and we bought it, even though it is not the same set of (4) chisels I’ve been reading about. Not a bad price (although I REALLY do not need more files), and I thought despite the dreadful handles, it’d be good to have intermediate, metric sizes. Turns out two are pretty close, but hey. Hey! whatever.

On to more eBay:

A combination gaugeYay! finally! yay!

The next two are still greasy grimy:

Record 044 with… 14 cutters!

Stanley 71 1/2 router (this time with only one cutter,it is difficult to win one of these on eBay)

And shiny and new:

Starrett 10MEH-150, Stanley 10-049, piece of granite

I got the Starrett 10MEH-150 150mm combination square. This is supposed to be for students, with my budget, I preferred to get a quality small model that will always remain useful, rather than an unreliable full-size one. I found the Stanley 10-049 folding pocket knife in the local hardware store, so I got it for marking accurately. And our marble guy just gave us a chunk for free when we asked for a very flat one to sharpen/flatten on. This was in his refuse pile, so it is certainly not certified or anything, but at least against the combination square it looks perfectly flat:

And perfectly square:

It could be that both are wrong in the exact same way I suppose ;D

More eBay:

4 moulding planes that I probably shouldn’t have bought (yet). I could not resist. They are things of beauty. For all I know they may be completely fucked up, but indeed, what do I know.
And:

Cheap, boring and effective

10 Silverline sash clamps (60 and 90 cm).

And this is a group picture of the things I mentioned in the previous post:

Some planes, a gouge and a saw

I think this is actually all we need to build the workbench, and then some! from now on we can just get what we need when we need it at a more relaxed pace. RIGHT?

This is all that’s happened in the workshop in the last months.

It was the hugest mess that you can possibly imagine, with tools, materials and boxes piled high in no order whatsoever. You could barely step in to open the window.

Oh. This has also been going on. The resident pigeons rebuilt the nest after I had to remove it, together with two laid eggs, from the original hayloft windowsill so the window and roof workers would not disturb an occupied nest. It was a bit sad but I had to do it.
On the rebuilt nest, they have already raised three chicks, in two batches.
It’s currently occupied:

Loki goes crazy over this, of course, so meanwhile I covered the window with some cardboard.

This past weekend was a long one so we armed ourselves with valour and cleaned up the workshop.
We put the still boxed contents of the workshop (the original ones) in the staircase landings, and then organised the contents of the workshop (the new ones, all the tools, paint etc we got for renovating the house). What took the longest was organising all the screws in a small cabinet with little drawers!

I was surprised that everything fit in the three shelves we put up there and a few toolboxes. All in all took like two days (not intense ones, it’s boring work).
Then Pim put a tarp over it all and started to plaster the room. The ceiling is nearly done, then he’ll do the walls. Then we’ll paint. And then, finally! we’ll place the floorboards and baseboards, then I’ll apply the finish.
Hopefully by then this room will stop coughing up sand and dust into the rest of the house? And it’ll hopefully be of some use, too.

Which brings me to… workshop work. I haven’t enamelled or done any metalwork in like two years, probably more, who’s counting? I don’t see it happening any time soon either (and when it does, I bet it’s gonna be some champlevé: a house number and a postbox cover). First of all because the workshop won’t be ready, and second because I want to make it real nice. Not just to have a real nice workshop but because I love wood and I’ve always wanted to get into woodworking and this is the best chance I’m gonna get.

So I’m determined to stick yet another pursuit into the workshop (and my time), and build the workshop at the same time. I had read a couple woodworking books over the years and overall just sighed a lot (and fawned upon and cleaned up old furniture) until recently I discovered the hand tool revival movement, or whatever you want to call it, and realised that *this* is feasible, useful, enjoyable as fuck and well within my capabilities, budget and space constraints.
I just don’t enjoy working with power tools at all, and they’re expensive, big and noisy. And ugly, I’ll admit that’s a factor for me.

Anyway. I’ve been trolling eBay a little, getting a tool here and there*, reading lots, watching videos, got a subscription to woodworkingmasterclasses.com (which is awesome) and bidding my time. I still have many tools to get in order to have a basic set (this prospect is heaven to a tool lover). Old tools in many cases! Most cases! I do my best!

And I have to build a workbench :) This is of course a large space investment in a smallish workshop (I’ve got 12 m² plus a staircase landing where the kilns go), so it’ll of course double as metalworking bench. A nice woodworking vise is perfectly capable of holding a drawplate, amirite?
Not sure yet were I’ll bolt the rolling mill, it may be bothersome on the woodworking bench, so perhaps it’ll go on the jewellery bench. May have to put casters on the woodworking bench… The sort that comes up when not in use, you don’t want to pull on a drawplate with casters rolling all over the place…

So now I’m busy in sketchup trying to come up with a layout. Pulling my hair out!
I need to pack a couple benches, a desk somewhere, a kitchenette thing (storage and a sink, basically), and LOTS of storage for all the shit. That while of course accommodating the boiler and water pipes which are in this room… and will have to be covered up with some cabinet.

I’m trying to get Pim interested in the woodworking thing, with little success… so far ;) I still think he may use the bench also, and accommodating our 20cm height difference might be a challenge. I do not want to do woodworking in high heels. If he doesn’t show interest any time soon, I might have to ignore his height ;)

*you want to know which tools that might be? So far I got a tenon saw that needs to be sharpened, a fillister plane that needs to be sharpened, a pair of tongue and groove planes that need to be sharpened, a gouge that needs to be sharpened, a Record #4, Stanley #4 and Stanley #4 1/2 (the three were a lot) that need to be sharpened, a wooden jack plane and a shitty metal block plane (another lot) that needs to be sharpened… do you see a pattern? I need to get me some sharpening plates soon and start practicing. A random collection of tools… I only have one chisel that I bought years ago** when I needed to fix a broken chair! but yeah I pick the deals as I find them.

** do you want a footnote on a footnote?? 
I went to check. That was in 2008! and 2010 because that’s how long it takes me to finish things (it says “because I have two chairs, second to be finished by 2020 or so” sounds just about right). I did this when I had no fucking idea whatsoever (literally, I didn’t know the name for a chisel… in English anyway, and a rung was a “stick” :D). The chair is still fine.

A friend commissioned this pair of matching pendants for a special occasion. The dragon motif was provided by her. I took a break from working on our new house refurbishment to make this commission and another one I’ll be posting soon.

Enamel over copper (transparent enamel over white opalescent enamel and black china paint) sterling silver settings and sterling + glass beads.

I am also making a few other pieces in the meantime, since once I put the kiln on it makes little difference for me to make one or several pieces at the same time. It actually helps me keep a rhythm, since there is quite a bit of waiting involved in enamel making.

Counter-enamelling

I won’t say it is always this way (that a batch of pieces is preferable to a single one), since in some cases it isn’t, but for most of the work I do and my working style, it certainly is. And when it comes to my “weak” spot, the setting of the enamels, let me say this is not the case at all! at the end of this, like usual, I’ll be left with a few enamels I won’t have the time, energy or budget to make settings for.

Now, I am not sure if I’ll be allowed to show these commissions once finished, but most certainly not now. I still have some images vague enough, or focused on the “filler” enamels, that I sure can show.

As shown on the picture above, I’ve taken a liking to counter-enamelling pieces first, with no gum, and without firing the coppers alone first (as I learnt in school). So I just wash the back with strong detergent, counter-enamel with a spatula and fairly dry counter-enamel, and fire. I leave the pieces to cool and shed firescale, then pickle. Then I’m ready to enamel the front.

White opal enamel bases – some opals become transparent when overfired, then come back on the next firing

This is working very well for me. It may be a huge mistake on thin, flat or very odd-shaped pieces, which may get warped, but these strong domes do beautifully.

An experiment in my Mist series

One of my batches is of my Mist series. On two of these, I am experimenting with colour! The blue one is in a way a mix of grisaille and china paint, which in fact all of the Mist series are, but this one in particular, being blue, really reminds me of grisaille in the style of Andreu Vilasis as I learnt in school.

One of my pyrometres

I had a bit of a horrid moment when I thought my pyrometre had kicked the bucket, but it was just a burp. I had to unscrew the back of the oven and push it further in. Phew.

Painting on glass

Evaporating oil off china paintings

One of the commissions in the early stages

I am rather set back with my first commission, which thankfully is not urgent (yet! at this rate…) due to the patina for the settings. The enamels are already finished, and in fact, so are the settings, except for the patina and actually setting the enamels in them, and attaching the bead strings, which are also made.

Usually I use a Spanish product to create an “antique silver” or even black finish, like in my Black series.

This product doesn’t last long and what I had left was useless, but I failed to notice this before my latest trip to Barcelona. I really cannot find it online (other than for an exorbitant shipping from Spain) so I decided to try liver of sulphur for the first time. I cannot achieve the same result with it! so I am gonna have some of the patina I am used to shipped by a friend in Spain. Other than the patina, the pieces are nearly finished!

Iris stole Loki’s seat next to me, so he sat on top of her

I love these and I use them a lot! I made a pair for my boyfriend, for both of my parents, and for myself! lovely yarn.

I got this cloche (actually a cheese dish with… cloche?) in a local thrift shop, a couple of years ago. I thought it was dirty or just covered in hard water marks. The lightning in the shop is pretty bad.

Turn out it was permanently etched. Apparently this can happen due to salts or other chemicals carried in the water that condenses on the surface of the glass. Could be the glass is of poor quality (looks like recycled glass) or maybe a particular noxious kind of cheese was stored in it? hehe.

Anyway, the cloche lingered unused because the etch was bad enough to not allow much light for plants and hiding the contents.

Today I decided to try and polish it, I didn’t have much to lose.

To my surprise it worked!

Here a portion of the cloche had been polished. The glass doesn’t look perfect (nor do I want it to, I do like shabby, not to the extent of un-usability though), but it is again transparent and usable.

I used my small motor (similar to a Dremel) with a felt polishing tip (I tried the cotton wheel but the results were not as good) and white polishing compound for silver, from a jeweler’s supply shop. This is just what I had around. I don’t know how other compounds would work, but the wheel with no compound did nothing, to be sure. The compound is important.

Then when I went on to actually build a terrarium I realised that I couldn’t access my supplies. We do have a bit of a temporary set-up in the kitchen. I think it perhaps better wait until after we move. That is months away… and then I won’t have the time I guess. We’ll see!

I now have this project in the backburner. I registered a domain, enamelworkshop.com, created a landing page in the website, and have set up a newsletter.

SUBSCRIBE!
See you soon,
Mer

——–

Hello everyone!

I’ve been pondering about this for a long time now. I got the idea due to the very positive response I got to the videos I posted to Grains of Glass (all of the videos I took at the time are here in my website).

09P: Shading enamels from Mer Almagro on Vimeo.

Even though my purpose when filming them was more illustrative for potential customers than didactic, I got many thank-yous and people telling me they had learned from them. I also got a lot of questions. I did answer the best I could within the scope, but I also saw that the videos had a great potential to actually teach, reaching people anywhere in the globe, which is not possible for me to do locally.

Of course in order to do this properly I would have to spend a lot of time and effort, so it would become sort of a… job? My idea is not to be the sole teacher but to have guest contributions as well. I have also contacted people in other fields (sound, image, coding, etc) that would offer their knowledge in order to create a professional product.

Before jumping head first I thought I should probably make a survey. I made one here:

FILL IN THE SURVEY

If you would be at all interested in enamelling classes online, at any level, it would be very helpful to me if you could take a moment to fill it in. You can also forward the link to anyone you think could be interested.
The survey is anonymous and all questions are optional.

Perhaps together we can make this possible.

Any other suggestions are also welcome, here through the forum or directly to my email: mer.almagro@gmail.com

Many thanks to everyone in advance!
Mer

We bought a house! as in, really a house (I have always lived in apartments), with garden and everything! It hasn’t really sunk in yet. We still don’t have the keys, that will still take at the latest two months, and then hopefully we will do some renovations before we move in, several months later. It needs central heating and roof isolation at the very least.

The house was built in 1932 to 35 (no clear records) and preserves most of the original features. These beautiful terrazzo* tiles are on the ground floor.

Apart from the roof, the central heating boiler and gas installation, we want to do everything ourselves. My partner has some experience, he helped his father rebuild their entire house.
Ambitious perhaps, we will see. There is a lot to do… and I expect I will be blogging about it :) I do love to restore furniture and there is plenty of wood:

Pretty hardware. Part of the handle is wood.

Staircase!

But so much more than wood. There will be tiles, and some plaster, and of course paint and… plumbing and electricity which are scarier! It will take a long time for sure :)

As could be expected my other projects are taking a back seat. And now back to the drawing board!

* It is obviously terrazzo with the little bits of marble inlaid in the colored cement. However the patterns seem to be made in the same way than hydraulic tiles, with a separation between different colours of cement. Some sort of hybrid? I guess the 30’s were a transitional time between hydraulic and terrazzo. In any case I expect these can be polished!

Part 1, 2, 3, 4, 6

Weimar are beaded cuffs in two versions, with picot hem and overlapping, short-row shaped cuff worked back and forth, which is then joined and worked in the round. Very little sewing, just the overlap at the cuff.

The beads are applied as you go (with crochet hook or wire), except for the beads in the picot hem for version B (black) which are threaded.

Intermediate to advanced knitters.
Skills: k, p, provisional CO + closing hem, beading, m1r and l, short rows (only a few wraps to lift, good for short-row beginners).

Picture tutorial for the beading in the picot hem for version B (black).

Cuffs Version A (red), colourway: 3609.
Cuffs Version B (black), colourway: 8903.

Gauge 27 sts and 34 rows x 10 cm (4”) in St st in the rnd, with
main needle (2.75 mm – US 2).

Notions:
A crochet hook small enough to fit through the beads or a bit of folded wire, stitch markers, tapestry needle.
Miyuki 8/0 seed beads:
Cuffs version A (red): 144 beads galvanized silver.
Cuffs version B (black): 226 beads galvanized gold.

Finished Measurements:
Wrist circumference 14.5 cm (6”)
Hand circumference 21 cm (8”)
To be worn with slight negative ease.

More photos in Ravelry!

I will probably have to model these myself, and probably also take the photographs, since it is too dark when my man is at home. I will try to do it today, so publishing soon!

Meanwhile work continues on my other set of orange gloves.

Debbie Bliss Andes 370022

So much fun I am now considering to do this regularly. Hosting a give-away of one of my patterns or eBooks, with its corresponding KAL, every month or two. Maybe every months is overwhelming.

Fun! What do you think?

So she said she would. Even though she doesn’t want to “spoil” it. Life is too short to worry about that! I also had to talk my father into wearing his socks.

Anyway. I came back to a nice message from Aimee, aka froggymonkey from Knitting in circles podcast, pointing out a few mistakes on the pattern I wrote for this shawl, Ledrada (her project here). I published this one year ago, and as we say time doesn’t pass in vain, one does learn and there were improvements to be made.

I corrected the mistakes and the chart, improved the line by line instructions, adding the stitch count to them as well, increased a needle size (I now do this by default since I am such an extremely loose knitter and the needle I used is never to be trusted) and also clarified the modification instructions a bit.

So to celebrate, I am giving away 5 copies of the eBook (which includes the mittens, photo below). Comment in this topic in Ravelry to get yours!

Update: this was so successful I ended up giving 13 eBook copies away, thanks everyone!! :D

A few years ago I found an incredibly soft, long haired fake fur at the local yarn store, and bought quite a bit of an ivory colour. With this I made an extra tall collar, I put the elastic loops in the same places my other collar has them. I still have a lot of fur left. Thinking of lining a little cape UFO I have in the chest.

Anyway, my plan was to buy some in black to make another collar for my black coat, or to put into this cape, but when I went to get it, some time later (this fur was very expensive) they had ran out. All this time I’ve been checking if they restocked it, and finally asked. They said it was just too expensive, and also difficult to find. You tell me about it.

I still haven’t seen it coming back, but this Monday, they finally had some very soft fur. It is not nearly as long haired, but it is also very nice. I bought a little for a simple collar following the same shape than the original:

Left, new collar, right, original one. It feels like garbage bags chopped up very thin.

I made it yesterday, some interfaced rustic silk, salvaged from an old dress, makes the lining, and some loops of elastic attach it to the coat. And this is how it looks in another of my coats. Why, just sew some buttons on the inside of the lapel, and you can attach the collar to it:

Excuse the picture quality: 10:30 AM, pitch dark indoors.

Continuing on the UFO chest project, yesterday I mended some of Pim’s trousers:

First I sewed a patch of fabric on the inside, and over the hole in this woven fashion, I don’t know how it is called in English. My skills leave much to be desired, so I knitted a little patch to go over it. This is knitted in very thin laceweight with 1.5 mm needles, making it my smallest knitting to date. 12 sts on the side make for 3 cm approx. I cast on the outside edges and swirl decreased towards the center. It is St st and would curl, but it is sewn down, so… It passed the BF’s approval since it is the same colour and quite discrete. We’ll see how it holds up after washing, this may get interesting… I sewed along the edges but also along the swirl, so hopefully it will maintain the shape.

Oh and this one, I cast it on Monday. Just a yummy yarn (in the skein at least), needles and improvisation. Triangular shawl, perhaps. Just for fun. It doesn’t seem like the yarn should be frogged, so we’ll see what comes out of it.

Meanwhile, as usual, I could not resist the urge to… cast on! For a scarf and some cuffs in red, with silver beads! perhaps a hat too :) I may have enough yarn. The yarn is Drops Baby Alpaca Silk, which I love.

I started with the scarf… lette? It has some shaping via short rows:

A very simple thing, as it should be in this case! It is going fairly fast. I got quite a few beads and at first my idea was to bead it all the way along the length, but then I thought this would be a little too much and decided to do just one smaller motif, not centered.

Yesterday I tidied up my sewing nook. It is so, so challenging to keep it tidy!

That furry thing there? a fake fur collar I am making for my coats!

It is really tiny, everything except my “portable” 40’s Singer 306K, which sits under my vanity, is in there, plus inside that closed (the door on the left) which is quite shallow. Everything being all the fabric, notions, haberdashery, ironing implements including the board (I had to move the iron itself to another shelf though) polyfill… it is really very stuffed in there.

The cabinet to the right is my beloved Singer 15-88, with the original bill from 1953 (it costed about 8000 francs, which is about 200€, which was a lot of money back then! it still works like the first day though*).

The basket on the left contains the most likely to ever be finished UFOs, and on top of it sits my vintage Bernina overlocker.

For the first time in my life, I decided to let go of some UFOs. They were just hopeless. That was only just enough for the other UFOs not to overflow :D I decided that I really have to work on these. Many are no-brainers, simple things like band t-shirts that need smallifying.

Started yesterday already. I had a shirt and a long-sleeved t-shirt from Pim that needed elbow patches. He had these sandpaper elbows for a while there, I guess.

These have been in the basket for possibly years, shame on me!

I also hemmed a nearly finished dress I made some time ago. Over a year ago I think ;P I found these woolen knits in the fabric store and I made two dresses. One was a very fine fabric and I made a long-sleeve reversible dress (not that I ever wear it with the wool on the inside, which is itchy and not actually warmer, but it felt like such an accomplishment at the time!), lined with viscose jersey, that I have worn a lot, so that one at least was successful. The other, this one below, is sleeveless, shorter and more fitted. The fabric is thicker, fluffier and has no drape. It was a mistake to make a dress at all, it should have been a cardigan or so. But it is so very warm so I should wear it at least on cold days.

The neck and armholes looked awfully weird, but picking up sts and knitting three rows or so with a rayon yarn really did fix that nicely. I now have to steam it a bit and hope it is wearable outside the home.

*Ok, I admit I wasn’t there to see it ;P

And I always liked linen st so much, how come I haven’t yet designed anything with it? well this will be my next and I have to say I am in love with the fabric, the yarn and the colours:

Just on Ravelry just yet. Etsy +  Craftsy + Patternfish coming soon. Meanwhile: see Cognac in Ravelry.

I am amazed there was no pattern named Cognac in the database! Glad too :)

Yay more orange ;P

Life gets in the way sometimes. I have been doing my internship at Boondoggle, which was great.

I still have projects in knit-land, though. My next pattern is another shawl, one that was inspired by the yarn itself (Lana Grossa Bingo Solid). It will be named Cognac and have big, fat tassels. I am writing it down as we speak, and have already been wearing and enjoying the sample since November. Meanwhile, a teaser :) This shawl features a continuous i-cord all around. A loop of i-cord serves as cast-on, and from these live sts the i-cord edging is knitted at the same time than the shawl. The bind-off is also carried on from live sts, and to end the six sts are grafted together. It is a bit tricky to imagine, but rather easy to knit, really, so I made a video explaining it:

I knitted my first three pairs recently:

Bandy Legs

Welsh Country Stockings

Liab

The first pair I knitted for myself for the Ravellenics, and the last two pairs for my dad’s birthday. They are modelled by my BF who has slightly longer feet, I await a report from my dad, he is picking them up at he post office tomorrow!

So far then I have tried a short row heel and toe, a Dutch heel (I think both my dad’s socks qualify as Dutch heels?) and quite rounded toes grafted at the tip. I have to say I am not a fan of the short row heel or toe (and my flat St st is always rubbish as can be easily seen on the heel…). I really loved Liab’s “ribbed” cushy heel. Overall a fantastic pattern (and free!).

I modified the Welsh socks since the pattern was for a rather pointy toe and my father (and I inherited this to an extent) has very, very square toes. I knitted the following toe that I found somewhere on the internets (unfortunately I forget where):

Decrease rnd toe:
Needle 1,3: k to 4 sts to end, k2tog, k2
Needle 2,4: k2, ssk, k to end

Even St st 4 rnds.
Decrease rnd.
Even St st 3 rnds.
Decrease rnd.
Even St st 2 rnds.
Decrease rnd.
Even St st 1 rnds.
Decrease rnd, repeat decrease rnd until 7 sts per needle.

So with 28 sts remaining, Kitchener St.

I love this toe and I think I will be using it for myself as well!

Liab has a pointier toe than this but still rather wide, and I really like how it gradually merges the ribbing into the toe. It fits Pim’s toes so awesomely (picture above), I should use it for his socks in the future!

The cabling in Liab was challenging. I do not have much experience with cables, and the yarn is rather on the thin side, and I used 2mm needles (I estimated, correctly it seems, that I needed smaller needles due to foot size + my loose knitting), this made for rather challenging cabling, especially since I refuse to use an auxiliar needle, it was slow enough knitting as it was. I switched needles two times and finally settled on wooden needles which worked best with least amount of wrist pain (steel was better for cabling but UGH).

So, have I become addicted to sock knitting? I do not think I will now knit socks exclusively, but I see more socks in my future ;)

Next pair will be for Pim and next I am already envisioning a rather special pair of boot socks I will have to write the pattern for!

I’ll be giving away a Grand Place – Grote Markt eBook to the first 8 people to reply to this thread in Ravelry!

I would love to see some more projects pop up in different colours and yarns :)) what would your choice be?

I am not at all familiar with it yet, of course, and the light is gone now (argh!) but I anticipate much fun :)))

This is a Molehill shawl knitted with the hair of a lovely dog! I cannot say it better than Raveler Karen, aka luvmypony herself:

“This shawl is 100% Turk hair. Turk is my Border Collie x Norwegian Elkhound. He has a lovely, soft coat with little to no guard hairs. I brushed him and saved his hair for spinning. He’s the gift that keeps on giving. I often refer to him as my Fibrehound.

I intended to spin a fingering weight yarn but it came out slightly heavier than that. Then when I knitted with it, it BLOOMED! This shawl is thick and warm.

Fun project, just to see if it could be done and what would happen.”

Turk

The shawl looks indeed lusciously warm! :) luvmypony has knitted a second Molehill with mohair. I do think the fuzzy yarns suit the pattern.

And this inevitably brings me to the little story of why I started to knit in the first place… I could simply not bear to throw away my cat’s fuzz that I was combing out! thinking of what useful purpose to put it to, the obvious one is spinning it into yarn, then… knitting something with it? of course I didn’t want to spoil the fuzz with my first attempts at either, so I endeavoured to, first learn how to knit, then eventually learn to spin. Learning to spin seemed the most daunting, and so I still have not gotten started! I started knitting in March 2009, designing in December 2010, and still the cat fuzz is stored safely away waiting for me to learn to spin and finally figure out what to knit with it! A very special, tiny stash of cat fuzz is that I have of my late cat Mino:

Mino in 2010

Mino was a short hair with very little fuzz, and he hated brushing, which he actually didn’t need anyway, so I have a very little amount of it. I do have the greatest amount of fuzz from Iris, she is a longhair with loads and loads of fuzz! she doesn’t like brushing very much, but she actually needs it :) and then of redhead Loki, who is also a shorthair but has a little more fuzz than Mino used to have, I also have a little amount. He doesn’t mind brushing much, but he just cannot stay still for a second so it is difficult to!

Mino, Loki as a kitten and Iris in 2010

It all started with my web hosting company going rogue on me. Word to the wise: if you are considering dh2.net, run, run in the opposite direction like the wind! if you have your website hosted with them, I would say get your domain name transfered to enom.com and back up all your data! Now researching a little online I also found this which doesn’t look good at all, does it?

So shortly after paying for renewal of my domain + hosting for another year, my website went down. Unlike other less fortunate people the domain was still at my name with enom (dh2.net is -or was?- their reseller) so I could transfer it to my account with them. Had to pay for it again but at least I didn’t lose it!

Meanwhile my files were apparently still hosted ay dh2.net. They still are as we speak. Once my domain name started working again, I could back up all my files via FTP. Most of my website is working over at my boyfriend’s server anyway, so once it all goes down, which I have no doubt it will*, I’ll just move the rest over there.

So well, in all this debacle my custom blog domain blog.innershelter.net of course stopped working. Once I got my domain up again, it kept not working, despite me trying various settings and following blogger’s instructions. I changed it back to the blogger URL (inner-shelter.blogspot.com), then back again… still not working, and then I got slapped with some blogger maintenance that disabled any changes for days… argh!!.

Today I was able to change it back again, finally! and decided to just give up, at least for now, and update my website with the working URL for the time being.

So well that was my little stressful adventure of the last few days! ugh.

A more pleasant post is coming right away :)

*I run my teacher’s website focgallery.com which we also had hosted in dh2.net … and the same thing happened a few days later, of course. This time I knew what to do!

My latest release has come with a bit of a surprise to be honest! after a hint-suggestion by my friend Vane on Saturday, I bought the yarn and started knitting a mane for my cat Loki. I finished, photographed and published the pattern on Sunday, which was my cat’s birthday. I was pleasantly surprised when Loki posed with it on for a full 5 minutes before pulling it off! I was also more than pleasantly surprised when the pattern made it to the top of the “Hot right now” Ravelry pattern page after just a few hours! Still there with currently 875 favourites (!), with many comments and mentions in the forums.

Beyond that, I am seeing it popping up in Facebook (We Love Wool’s post has been liked 882 times and shared… 1124 times!), many blogs (this post totally made my day), pinterest… wow! :D I mean, of course Loki is such a charming little lad (and has his own tumblr!) but I didn’ expect such a response! I am truly overwhelmed :D

Oh, and the pattern is free! ;)

Two shawls on the needles and one just finished!

The one I finished yesterday and photographed today is this big, big mint-coloured shawl:

With my treasured, beautiful 50’s Spanish nightgown I was gifted long ago.

5 tassels

Loki who must pose in all pictures!

I wrote about this yarn when I got it. I used up nearly all 5 balls! I was considering full fringe but finally went for just the 5 tassels. The central spine divides towards the end so I put 3 tassels at the tips of the “spines” and at the tips of the triangle.

The fabric is very drapey and perhaps the stitches look a little loose, but it really feels very nice and light which is nice for summer, so I am glad I used rather big needles. Even before I finished this shawl, I had already started another! I forced myself to put it aside to finish this one, then picked it up again :) I am using the yellow yarn I bought yesterday, and a variation of this pattern. The mint one is a deep triangle increasing 4 sts every RS row, and the yellow version increases that plus an extra 2 sts every WS row, because I want a shallower shawl. Also smaller. I got two balls of yarn and knitting at a somewhat loose gauge again (also 5mm needle) but this time the stitch definition is pretty good none-the-less:

The yarn is soooooo soft! I really love knitting with it :> the fabric feels amazing and light, and the yarn while knitting it too! very happy with it, we’ll see how it wears. Considering writing the pattern of this shawl up! it is rather simple but I am thinking of a more decorative edging for the yellow version…

And yes, I said I have two shawls on the needles. The second is Amanda Muscha’s Medusa. I couldn’t possibly resist this pattern. Apart from being really pretty, we share name! well, I am talking about my screen name of course, Medvssa (a lot of people seem to have trouble with it and write a variation of “medvessa”, I guess the problem is the v, I chose a v due to the lack of the letter u in Latin, I know Medusa comes from Greek but, poetic licence right? ;) same goes for the double s, inspired by modern Italian… in any case my screen name should be pronounced Medusa – that one is just too often already taken and Medvssa never is!).

I am knitting this one for my mother in law. Now let’s hope she doesn’t stalk this blog, I don’t think so ;) I got this silk yarn from Colourmart very long ago, because I thought she would like the rust orange (and she does! made a comment on the gorgeous colour when she saw the cone :)). I have started kerchiefs several times and ripped them. But I think this time it will stick :) I am modifying it though. She never wears anything else than rather small and very thin silk neck kerchiefs, no matter how cold it is! so a deep shawl might be too big even if relatively small. So I did a rate of increase of 4 sts on all rows for the St st version, and now I am doing the lace edging following the pattern, but I will make it rather narrow. We’ll see how it looks and I hope I don’t rip this one up :)

Rust 100% silk cone from Colourmart