Chateau de Chatelaine

Warning: this is a looooooooong post. It’s about three posts rolled into one. With lots of stitchy pics though, so stick around :o)

I hope your Christmases were wonderful and warm (inside) and white (outside), though not too white, because, well...

…what does one do when one is snowed in and one’s computer crashes at the same time? Well, one weeps and tears out one’s hair and wrings one’s hands and when the weeping and tearing and wringing is done, one stitches. And what does one stitch? One stitches a strawberry. As one does, around Christmas time:

This is one of the strawberries designed by Niki Farrauto for Blackbird Designs’ beautiful Christmas book Joyeux Noel, stitched on 30 count R&R Iced Cappuccino that I coffee dyed and baked in the microwave because I was silly enough to stitch on the wrong side of the fabric. Luckily, I used DMC threads for the stitching, otherwise I would have been in the soup, with me coffee dying my fabric after the stitching was done. I didn’t stitch this strawberry because I felt particularly festive or Christmassy (what the hay? Feeling Christmassy? There’s no such thing, I’m sure), but because I needed a fob of some weight and length for the adornment of my self-made chatelaine.


You see, I’m always losing my needles and scissors around here, and I don’t mean between stitching sessions. No, I lose them during these sessions. Whilst stitching. My child and my cat take delight in getting into all sorts of impossible situations that I have to rescue them from (every two minutes or so), so I’m always flying hither and thither and when I settle my behind in my stitching chair for another round of two minute stitching, I will have lost every stitchy thing I need. It was obvious to me that I needed a chatelaine to put around my neck, so that I would at least always have my needle and my scissors handy and that there wouldn’t be any danger of one of the beasts gobbling up my needle while I’m busy rescuing the other. What to do, what to do? I thought. I knew The Drawn Thread has a magnificent design for a chatelaine, but I don’t have it and I don’t have time to order it, wait for it to arrive and then stitch it. By the time I would get to finish-finishing it, Pelle would be about 40 years old and I would have no use for it anymore.

What I do when I have to think about stitchy things is I go through my drawers filled with fabrics, threads and charts and it was in one of these drawers that I found the solution to my problem...

kumihimo

Now, I admit that this sounds rather like a fascinating and intricate way of killing oneself, but in actual fact, it’s a Japanese braiding technique. I went on the internet (when my computer was, as yet, un-crashed) and looked up some stuff about kumihimo. One thing I learned is that kumihimo is not cross stitch. There is hardly anything to be found on the WWW, but the information I did find I used, and you can see the results in the picture below. Once the braid was long enough (about four long evenings later), I had to think of a way to finish it. By this time, my computer was belting out steam in its quiet corner in the room, so I was pretty much on my own. Then I thought of the strawberries and thought they were the perfect solution to the fob problem.

I think the (Dutch) term Crea Bea has never been more aptly used :o)

Once I had shoveled a path through the snow and I could get myself and Pelle out of our cottage, what do you think I found in the mail? A very, very early (or slightly belated) birthday gift from Harmien!
Don’t you agree that, with these fabulous goodies made by the Queen of Neatness herself, my primitive-looking, sampler-themed stitching set is as good as complete? Harmien, you couldn’t have picked more perfect designs for my birthday gift. I love, love, love all of it. Harmien added a cute notebook and some needle magnets, and the gift came wrapped in that stocking you see in the second picture. I nearly fainted when I saw that stocking, because I was actually afraid Harmien had wrought that as well, but she admitted (as I would never have done) that the sock was not self-made, at least not by her. The Christmas ornie is lovely too, isn’t it?

And since this post is already so long I’m bound to have sent my readers straight to Snoresville anyway, I might as well finish with a progress picture of the Pistols:

And here’s my cute pixie in the snow:

Can you say Awwwwwwwwwwwwww!?
Wishing you a very sparkly New Year’s Eve!

Yours Crea Beatively,
Annemarie.