It's been really nice and sunny here for several days now, and everything is exploding in bloom - especially those trees that give me hayfever. So while I'm really enjoying the utterly fine weather, I'm also looking forward to some nice, cleansing rain (that is fortunately forecast for tomorrow). And speaking of spring and spring happiness, here's a very good (and evil!) song that we stumbled across this weekend:

I'm sorry for the unannounced blog silence - our internet somehow stopped working yesterday evening, and I was without access for the morning and part of the afternoon. The friendly helpdesk man, however, told me they'd take care of it and fix the problem - and lo and behold, the Internet is back again.

Proper blogging again tomorrow!

During the past two days,  I stumbled across some very awesome and teeny-tiny stitchery. Check out these websites showing miniature stitchery of landscapes on background skies painted with textile colouring and embroidery for dollhouses in scale 1:12 (scroll down a bit, to "Beispiele"). While personally I'm not really a fan of petit point (contintental tent stitch on the Wikipedia page), because there's more embroidery thread in the back of the work than in the front, and I am much too cheap for that, those examples on the website are incredibly impressive and almost make me want to try it.

Just almost, don't you worry. I'll stick with my nice, large stitches over two threads on 20-threads-per-cm linen for a good while longer.

And finally a really nice video (h/t to Arachne, who facebooked this) with indubitable proof that textile works, creativity and innovation are never very far from each other:

I'm totally stumped for something interesting to blog for you today, and even a little tour of my standard check-in-the-morning websites didn't yield anything.

So... I have no blogging topic, the weather is rather grey and dull today after a few days with quite a bit of sun, my current embroidery-testing piece has not come very far (yet, though I'm getting better), and there's a stack of paperwork ...again... to take care of.

On a more positive note, the tulips in the garden are starting to seriously come out, a few of the crocuses are in bloom, and the first batch of tomato seedlings has broken through the earth - plus I'm sniffling. Seems as if spring is really coming here - slowly, but still.

This weekend was nice and rather productive - for one thing, after ages and ages of not spinning on the wheel, I finally emptied the bobbins and started making some yarn again.

I spin relatively thin, on the wheel as well as on the spindle, and most of the time when I used the spinning wheel in the past few years was either to show (or teach) somebody how to use it, or - with a different contraption stuck where flyer and bobbin usually sit - for spooling thread. And now I'm at least planning to spin two bobbins full of single and then ply them together. Who knows, I might even use that yarn for embroidery or maybe even tablet weaving then.

Second productive thing was figuring out a bit more about embroidery and work procedures - now the only thing left to do is to get proper, authentic-thread-count, good-quality linen.

And the third thing was playing around with old sewing machines. A friend had scored an old sewing machine destined for the landfill and came to our place with it so we could all take a good look at it and see if it would still work. Turned out that one bit had been damaged, which led to this bit being removed and then re-made by our friend - and now I've almost finished finetuning the bit so it will fit in and run smoothly. And that meant that a corner of our apartment looked like this during the weekend:


Still does, by the way. But I've almost finished getting the surplus material out of the way - and then we can find out whether that was time well spent or only time in which fun has been had.

I am still feeling my hand muscles from gripping the wool combs all weekend.

I now know that I am totally spoiled in regard to properly prepared fibre - I was not really having fun with that yucky commercially prepared Merino top. So little fun (and so much yuck), in fact, that I did much prefer to make me a quick, not-very-well-done bit of top on my combs to do demonstration spinning.

Just in case that you (like me) have not yet seen pictures of how silk throwing to get organzine actually works, the process is explained (with pics) on WormSpit's blog.

Oh, and this little blog has gained its 100th "follower" - welcome! This does feel like a real milestone for me.

This blog post is late. Not just because somehow I fell asleep again and woke up much later than I had intended to, but also because I had not the shade of an idea about what to blog today. This lead to me totally having to do this and that little chore before sitting down to blog - and then I found the mail where somebody told me that one of my followers was a porn spammer. And can you believe it took me a good while to figure out how to block that guy? (Turns out that you have to click on "Followers" from the dashboard listing of your blog, and not from the blog itself. Gah.)

So now I'm back to 98 followers, a bit smarter on how to block somebody from the list (though I hope it won't be necessary often) and still out of an idea for something nice to blog about. So instead you get a gratuious photo from out of my private life:



Yes, that's from the wedding.

Oh, and almost one hundred followers - anybody up for a bet on when it will reach three figures?