Post 387 Deliveries - and a couple of completions.

I'm posting early this week to test whether Feedburner has ceased emails.It is not clear to me whether it stops from or after August.  I have a manual email ready to send. 

My post last Tuesday prompted calls and messages from Guild friends to tell me that the Certificate Workshop I thought had been  cancelled due to lockdown  had been changed because of the Guild's Country Conference  (which was cancelled) and was in fact scheduled for the following Saturday. Nothing lost. One good consequence of lockdown was that I didn't turn up at the Guild on the wrong Saturday morning!

I did a bit of shopping on Wednesday, to replenish my vegetables and meat, and call at Create in Stitch. I only saw one person not wearing a mask, and she looked as if she might have had breathing difficulties. 

I also finished the linen herringbone sampler I was working on and dug out fabric I thought would help turn it into a bag.

I had bought some fresh prawns while shopping, so had a prawn salad for dinner with corn chips.  

Thursday was back to Pilates. Great to be back. In the afternoon I was blessed with a visit from Katherine and a couple of the girls. Lovely to see them after 9 days absence. In between I constructed the bag. I decided not to use the Moroccan print as lining as there was just enough of the pinky linen to line it as well as complete the outside.              

This gives me four bags to put in the upcoming Guild exhibition at the Hamra Gallery.

While I had the iron out, I attended to a mending project that I dug out during lockdown. This is the batwing top that had developed tshirt holes back in March 2020. Last week I came across a motif I had saved from a piece of fabric years ago and thought it would cover those holes. I have now attached it to the top using Misty Fuse, and overstitched the edges by hand to control fraying. 

It will give a few more months of wear to a favourite top in warmer weather.

The first of my orders to arrive this week were books. Thee are background to some research I'm doing on Anglo-Saxon, Viking, and Celtic embroidery. The Women of the Celts has an interesting analysis of the story of Blodeuwedd, the woman of flowers, who's story underpinned my Alan Garner embroidery.

I bought a number of George Bain's books when working in Scotland in 1972, but lent them to someone in the 80s and didn't get them back. His work is detailed and fascinating. I'm not sure I will use any of the designs, but they are really interesting - and add to several more I already have.

I was so pleased to have a message on Saturday from Paul, in Oklahoma, the brother of my dear friend Diny who died on 29 September 2019. Diny's family held a memorial for her last month at the Garden of the Gods in Colorado, a location dear to Diny's heart. She took Jim and I there in November 2009. I dug out some of the photos - in memory of both Diny and Jim in a beautiful and other-worldly place.

I made a tentative start on the Anglo-Saxon Horse embroidery that arrived a couple of weeks ago., just to see how it works. The design is from  a metal piece, possibly a sword hilt,  in the Staffordshire Hoard, a find of mostly gold artifacts from the 6th and 7th centuries.,and uses 11th Century Anglo-Saxon Embroidery techniques, mostly couching and stem stitch, to create the sense of gold filigree.  It is worked in two shades of perle and some DMC metallic. I haven't attempted any of the curls yet.

The box of Northumbrian runes I ordered from Russia arrived too - beautifully and economically packed (bottom right) - tightly wrapped in foam sheeting and closely taped, then in a simple envelope - a packer after my own heart! What will I do with them, you ask. It's a good question without a clear answer. I want to learn about the use of runes in England and may use them again in my embroidery, as I did with the Icelandic bag I made.

Also related to my Viking researches, the bone lucet I had ordered from Poland also arrived. I had a quick try at using it. It is easier than Naalbinding! I also discovered, in discussion at the Guild on Saturday, that someone in the past has given a class at the Guild using lucets, and that Peter Sanderson made a number of wooden ones at the time. I must follow up.

That leaves the woven wool fabric I ordered from the Ukraine as the outstanding order for my Viking Workshop next February. 

I was very pleased in the end that I was wrong about the Certificate Course being cancelled. We had a really terrific session on Saturday. Junette had done quite a bit more research since the WES presentation and had some inspiring examples of the work of modern Inuit artists.. There was a lot of energy in the group. I got carried away applying some of the Design Online lessons and using the concept of face silhouettes from one of Junette's examples - picking up on the Inuit notion of shamanism, those who can heal, watch over, care for souls and sometimes change into animals, especially birds.  I worked on this most of Sunday and finished it in between shopping and cooking on Monday. 

Of course, I turned it into a bag/pouch, adding my first Inuit embroidery to the back, with a zip at the top.

It's 25cmx20cm.

The red explosion was meant to be the midnight sun but ended up looking more like a volcano. I decided that's OK. There are volcanos in the Canadian Arctic Circle and in any case it is a fantastic, not a literal scene. 

I really had a lot of fun with this.

For Monday's dinner I put the spiraliser to the test. I made a huge stirfry with duck, bacon, broccolini, salami, beans, bock choi, chives, capsicum and noodles, and made a small version with spiralised zucchini instead of noodles for myself. It worked a treat. Obviously the spiraliser works better with zucchini than carrots. The meal was a success. Fionn and Veronica calculated the calories and were happy, as was I.

After my Pilates class on Thursday I took the plunge and ordered a vibrating exercise machine. Martine has had me using one at Pilates since I began losing weight. I found it hard at first, but also figured that it is a form of exercise that I might get into a routine to use at home. My order said it would be delivered on Tuesday, so I cancelled a podiatrist appointment to be sure I would be home to receive it. It arrived at 8.45am on Monday. Never mind. I only had time to unpack it and make sure it worked on Monday, but am setting up a twice a day 10 minute session to start with, three times if I am at home all day. Today's three sessions went well.

To complete a week of mail arrivals, the Zenbroidery design I ordered to add to my red coat arrived today. I'm in no hurry to start it, but it will be a good, grab-and-go relaxing project with a use at the end of it. 

I was back on transport to netball practice duty today.

As of this morning, I have lost 5kg in 5 weeks and 2 days. I also had another fasting blood test on Thursday. My doctor messaged me the results on Saturday, 'stable renal function; long term glucose test ok, not high enough for diabetes, good'. That's not the end of the journey - but I'm on the way.

Day 2: Getting to Stratford-on-Avon

I arrived at the Arden Hotel, Stratford-on-Avon, 28 hours and 15 minutes after I left my apartment in Adelaide. This might seem a long time to some, but to someone who first travelled from Sydney to London 52 years ago, this is pretty good travelling!

It was surprisingly to me, a nostalgic trip. Qantas has new videos to outline the safety features and instructions of aircraft. The video on the 737 Adelaide-Perth leg cleverly used footage shot in various cities around the world serviced by Qantas to illustrate individual elements such as brace position, seat belt closure, escape slide position. The Perth-London Dreamliner video used historical settings and uniforms from the 1950s through decades to today. It reminded me so much of my mother, who began working for Qantas in their staff canteen at Mascot airport in 1959. She was soon in love with Qantas, its history, the planes, the pilots, the 'hosties' - and travelled on most of the planes in the video in the more than 25 years she continued working for them as a file clerk. My brother and I heard all about it - the history, the changes, the daily interactions. It was often tedious, but left me with a strong sense of the impact of aviation on Australia. I really appreciate that Qantas values that history and maintains it as part of its culture and brand. My mother would have loved it.

On the first leg to Perth I mostly read, but did begin the first of my grab-and-go travel projects. I chose two bags I bought a few years ago. They are a reasonable size - roughly 35cm x 40cm - and were marketed as bags to be coloured with water-setting pencils or felt-pens. I thought the kids might like them but I had missed the moment. Although the figures are larger than the zenbroidery I have done before, I thought they would make great travel projects, using some of the 5 perle thread I've used for zenbroidery.

The bags are double-sided, with the same print on both sides of the bag. I began with this one.

We were delayed about 40 minutes out of Perth. so no sunset view. It was overcast and raining.

We made up the lost time, but the flight is currently 18, rather than 17 hours,  because the route has been rescheduled over Singapore and further north due to air traffic control issues 'in the Middle East'.




I had the 'supper' then slept, on and off for over 10 hours. I finished a book and got the eyes on one side of the bag to this point. It is a lot of fun working out which stitches and colours to try.

Technologies at airports have advanced since I travelled a year ago. Clearly data is being gathered and shared: no immigration or customs forms required, ePassports dominate and luggage screening happens as you move. Heathrow at 6am was very efficient. I had only a few minutes wait for my airport transport & the 90 minute drive to Stratford-on-Avon.

It was a miserable, wet, misty and cold morning, reminding me again of why I don't drive when on my own in England at this time of year.



So here I am, in the warm and cosy visitors' lounge at the Arden Hotel, with a few hours to wait for my room to be available, the sun struggling out, swans on the river, feeling relatively rested and content.

Might advance that owl.