A new monster! Whether this is a friendly monster or a mean monster probably depends on your digestive system.
You’ll find grain monsters in many places….
The flour canister is an obvious place to look.
The mixing bowl likewise, but….
They can appear in places you wouldn’t expect, as well!
Mean or nice, however, they like to play, especially if they can build something.
For more portraits and details about the pattern, visit the pattern page.
It was time for a tutorial on the local fibercraft blog I co-write, and I thought it would be the perfect opportunity for a locally-themed project, the kind I would worry was uninteresting to most readers here. I settled on a map of the area in blackwork embroidery and set to work. Over there you’ll find information about blackwork and stitching this pattern; here I want to discuss the design process.
Originally I wanted to partition the map into what we really think of as towns, which are smaller, more numerous, and more irregular than what the state governments regard as towns. The large boxy shapes date back to at least 1860, though, and I determined it would take me months to draw other boundaries. Drawing my own borders would also result in many arbitrary decisions about what was in or out of town.
I also didn’t intend to include 46 towns in the final map, but again, restricting would have required arbitrary decisions. The towns I included comprise the beat of the local newspaper, so any arbitrariness to the boundary is well in the past now.
To make the town outlines I imported an area map into MacStitch (of which I still owe you a full review) and traced the edges with backstitch. Deleting the cross-stitches was easy since none of them were black, so I was able to simply remove each color and its stitches from the palette. I then adjusted a number of the edge lines so all town corners would be at grid corners, in case anyone wants to make their own arbitrary exclusions.
I asked for and was granted permission to use fillings from Kim Brody Salazar’s wonderful blackwork fillings collection, but between asking and receiving I had the idea to make fill patterns out of the initial(s) of each town, and couldn’t let go of it. That meant 46 different fill patterns, 7 of which had to be built from the letter C. That is not a letter that has much difference between upper- and lowercase, or print and cursive. Also difficult were 3 Ws plus WF and WW. Oddly enough, the solitary F and E gave me more trouble than, say, the 4 Ss. Many evenings of sketching while watching the hubs play Skyrim passed as I designed letter fills and then slotted them into their locations.
A few more evenings passed while I stitched the beginning of my sample, shown above. I don’t have time to continue to be so dogged about this, so it will be some months before I’m done, but you’ll see it again then. I’m working on 32-count linen (over 2, for an effective count of 16) with a single strand of black embroidery floss (DMC 310). The stitching I’ve done is all six strands of a 2–2.5 foot length of floss.
There are a few useful links in the pattern post that are also now on the ideas and inspiration embroidery page, halfway down, where I’ve added a blackwork entry to the slowly growing directory of embroidery techniques.
In early April, I got the idea to make a bunch of origami flowers. I never actually did, but the idea stayed with me and inspired this month’s First Friday: making flowers out of paper. As you might imagine, I’ve been knee-deep in wedding sites this week, but the ultimate sources are a wide variety of DIY sites.
Since origami was the inspiration, let’s begin with it. Origami-Flower.org (a subsite of Origami-Make.com) has a long list of flowers organized by difficulty. Fewer but quite different flowers are available from the Origami Resource Center. There are many origami sites, so if you are looking for a specific flower a quick web search should set you up.
For successful non-origami flowers, the themes I’ve gleaned are patience and generosity with petals. Let’s survey some made with different kinds of paper. First, the accordion-folded tissue paper carnations many of us learned as children are given more nuance in a tutorial by Pink Paper Peppermints. I tried this, shown above, and the trimming made a big difference to the effect, though using fewer sheets of paper meant my flower shows its two-halves nature more. You can also make them tiny, as on Zakka Life.
Since they are already crimped, cupcake liners are a popular flower paper. My favorite versions were from DIY Network and Lia Griffith (who has many lovely flower tutorials; the picture below is two of her tutorials, albeit in inappropriate materials).
Crepe paper is likewise popular, especially for roses, which are all of the tutorials in this paragraph. Its main appeal is that if you have the grain lengthwise along the petal, you can stretch the center of the petal sideways so it cups, or the top edge of the petal so it ruffles. You can use a long strip as on Folding Trees or Country Living, a strip with petal shapes cut into it as on The Bride’s Cafe, or individual cut out petals as on Foofanagle. With the right kind of crepe, you can even make them huge, as on Martha Stewart (alternate instructions with more photos are at Green Wedding Shoes).
Since they are designed to survive being completely soaked, coffee filters take well to subtle (i.e., dilute) painting, and make lovely flowers. Martha Stewart has a rose tutorial, and although I wish it had more detail and progress photos, the result at the top makes me want to try it anyway. There’s a lot more detail in the tutorial for large peonies at Design Sponge if you want an easier entree to coffee filter flowers.
Ordinary paper becomes more malleable if you crumple and then smooth it, as used in this Instructables tutorial. (I usually avoid the crowd-sourced tutorial sites because of their grossly uneven quality, but I’m glad I clicked through on this one.) The comments on that tutorial are useful too. Cardstock can even be wet and shaped, and when it dries it will hold its shape but still look soft (in that link there are two tutorials, and the second does not require a special die or punch).
What should you do with paper flowers? Many sites recommend mixing them with real greenery for better-looking bouquets. Wire and Paper is a brief blog (plus a few extras on Facebook) about paper flower decorating: for vases, hand held bouquets, and shop displays. The photos there are lovely and you can get good ideas for materials and colors as well as uses. Although, of course, once I decided to add this section I could no longer find them, I saw a number of sites with stemless flowers attached to boxes, book covers, gift bags, headbands, and hair clips. You can string them together for a garland or hang them individually, make them into wreaths and cover picture or mirror frames with them.
I wanted to keep the number of links manageable but I can’t exclude the following lovely versions of specific flowers: crocuses and snowdrops (crepe paper), poinsettias (cocktail napkins), poppies (watercolor paper), and Chinese lanterns (coffee filters). I also want to include this tiny rose made from a strip of paper. The tutorial uses a special slotted tool but it could be done with a stuffing tool (large plastic yarn needle with the end of the eye snipped off) or perhaps two flat toothpicks taped together so their wide ends are close but not too pressed together.
If you want more or different tutorials, so, so many flowers in all sorts of materials are on Pinterest boards by manekibeader and zurina, with surprisingly little overlap. Also, in many cases you can make paper flowers with fabric: ribbon for long strips of paper, and lightweight fabric (starched if necessary) for sheets.
The real rose at the top was brought home by my husband and was three days old when the photo was taken, still looking as fresh as on day 1.