Sunday, June 30, 2013

No, that way madness lies, and other adventures with beads and net

With apologies to King Lear, but listen, he only had three contentious daughters  to contend with, never heard of his trying to wrangle net and tiny beads and couching with metallic threads.

So this is the latest in the current Tyvek adventure.  What I'm making is a group of motifs, couched and beaded on nylon net (pale blue, will blend with the original Tyvek painting).  I'll cut around them and applique them individually to the parts of the design they echo -- they do echo passages in the artwork,not random drawings.  So this involved creating the design on tracing paper,  then stretching this, with net over it, and attaching to stretchers.

I worked through the net and the paper, and as you see, tear out the paper backing after the outline is complete, to simplify the beading part.  



This is fiendishly hard to see, nylon net being what it is, but I think it will work fine once done.  And it has the added advantage of being portable, unlike a lot of my work, so I can take it in to my stitchers' meeting this week and continue work.

Also  I can take it into the auto dealership tomorrow morning while I await the medical verdict on my  14 year old Honda which suddenly started making some terrible shouting noises yesterday. Hoping for muffler, but prepared for fatal diagnosis, sigh.

And on the culinary arts side, I made a batch of basil pesto, and a batch of rosemary pesto for the freezer.  Ran out of walnuts, so used a mix of walnuts and sunflower seeds.  I'll give you a verdict when I eventually use the pesto.  And, as usual, I poured a cup and a bit of water into the blender and blended it up to catch all the good stuff left in the bottom of the blades, and froze that, too, to use in soup.  Waste not want not.

3 comments:

  1. this latest project sounds complicated but you will achieve something wonderful at the end of it.
    Trust your poor honda is repairable.
    Will pass on the basil pesto, love basil but the pesto sauce no thanks! it would be a dull world if we all liked the same though. To be honest had gone 65 years without trying it but then my SIL used some when I was there last year and no not for me

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  2. You really do like to make things hard for yourself. I'm sure it will be fantastic when you have finished it but I can't begin to imagine the amount of time and fiddliness involved in this little enterprise (grin). Go you!

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  3. I'm puzzled that you refer to pesto as sauce -- it's really an ingredient you put into dishes, such as spaghetti sauce, soup, and so on. I doubt if anyone I've fed has known there was pesto in the food, but they do like the depth of flavor they're getting anyway! perhaps some people use pesto differently.

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