I love Wonder Cabinets. I love the original Victorian ones, full of fossils and bones and other curiosities. The things that kind of freak you out with the horrid fascination of someones toenail collection or dried umbilical cord. Why, just, why would you store that?

Now Berlin is getting one of its own – but this is of a more handmade nature. Curated by Leah Buckareff of Cold Snap Bindery and hosted by La Bastellerie, you can come admire, goggle at and even buy the curiosities on display.

I’mJane Nicholas’s amazing book

Now because it isn’t a design of my own, I’m offering it for sale, but all proceeds will be put straight into Kiva, a micro lending organisation helping individuals around the world achieve great things by giving them a starting boost into self-sufficiency. I’ve been lending through them for a few years now (here’s my lending page ) and encourage everyone to do it. There’s even a Stitchalicious group for lenders I’d you’d like to take part in that.

So that’s my part in the Wunderkabinett, for now at least. Pop by the website if you can’t come and see it in person – Leah will be showcasing all that is going in there.

This spider was a fun little thing I did while playing around with knots. As you’ve probably noticed, I’ve been on a big knot thing recently – so large that I’m wondering if macrame is going to be appearing in my near future.

In this case I mainly wanted another excuse to do some Ghiordes Knots (because god knows it’s not like I haven’t already been putting them in everything I’ve stitched for the last year or so) and I had a vague curiousity about what would happen if I used two differently coloured threads in a Bullion Knot. And what happens? STRIPEY SPIDER LEGS HAPPEN. That rocks. A couple of french knots in red and some friends with a button machine and lo-and-behold a spider button was born.

This was seriously simple stitching stuff (again with alliteration!): Ghiordes knots (also  called Turkey knots) with one green and one black strand of floss in the needle stitched in a small oval, two bullion knots per leg also with one strand each of green and black and some bright red french knots for the eyes. That’s it. Now it graces my knife holder in the kitchen along with some other badges I picked up a few years ago – how can you not love the claim that “super-ness is no coincidence”?

Two and a half years ago TheAnticraft opened up submissions for their book and -much to my astonishment- accepted my proposal. Unfortunately,  I only found their email really close to the deadline, plus I was in Australia on holidays and I didn’t have any of the materials I needed to make it. So I trundled down to the local stitching store and had an amusing conversation with the owner as I was picking out a needlepoint canvas for the background – because I was looking for the tackiest one I could find and she was gushing over the beauty my choice. I am assuming it was good salesmanship. And then I stitched twelve hour days for several weeks. Can anyone say serious shoulder pain?

Now, after the piece flew to the States, was beautifully framed and photographed and published, I’ve got it back. I happened to have a frame which fit it (not as sexy as the one in the book unfortunately) so I’ve put it up for a while. It’s interesting looking back on a piece you haven’t seen in over two years and although I don’t tend to put my own stitching on my walls, I think I’ll keep this one up for a bit.

Stitch Graffiti

Yep, well that happened to me with temari.

I tried my first temari and it worked out better than I expected (after the first few failed attempts). So then I decided to branch out a little. To get a bit experimental. To just wing it.

my first temari - from detailed instructions

That, I ‘ve discovered, is not a good idea. Especially not with three-dimensional geometries which make even me pause to think about it- and I’m a trained crystallographer. Added in was that I hadn’t quite worked out the way the stitches work with and around each other, and that I thought “hey, wouldn’t it be cool to try and make it just a little asymmetrical?” . So I wound up with this. Ahhh, expert instructions – they never go astray. At least I made the thread-wrapped core myself – out of old socks.

Now I’m playing a little bit of catch up here – this piece (and the one which’ll go up in the next few days) have been blogged about before on my old blog and on flickr. Apologies to all who’ve already seen it, but I really want this blog to be the home of my embroidery activites and so I’m going to put up these few pieces from my recent exhibition.

Like the heart, this was inspired by kitschy flash tattoos. I didn’t keep the same style going through all pieces though, as I was interested in trying different techniques and looks on the same inspiration source.