A progress photo for the "Froth and Bubble" sampler. The original is surprisingly garish for my usual tastes, but I love it, though I admit to having toned down the colors a bit for my own version. I think Long Dog's style might best be described as "neo-traditional" -- this one looks Elizabethan in its motifs, yet the colors are quite modern (even though, yes, the Elizabethans loved bright colors!), and the verse is from a much-longer poem by the early-Victorian Australian poet, horseman, and sometime politician Adam Lindsay Gordon.
The stitching frame I'm using is a bit ungainly and a pain to shift, so I am working a page of the chart at a time -- it is six full-sized pages! I was a bit alarmed to see how very hot-pink that one flower stem (!) is, so I've left it either until I resign myself to it or can find a somewhat milder pair of pinks and pick this one out. The dark-brown outline would tame it a bit, but it's awfully vivid ...
In other news, I got a dirty big stack of books for my birthday, pictured here with a ringer. We went to go and hear Isabella Tree speak at the Theodore Payne Foundation recently, on a subject that interested both Julia and me, that of native-plant gardening and our relationship with our local environments -- the book was included in the ticket, but I would have bought it anyway, as it was fascinating to learn the effects of simply not doing anything, as it were, to the land, albeit on a much-larger scale and a very different climate than our own arid little suburban lot, and to begin to think about how we might work with nature instead of against it. I very much enjoyed reading the two volumes of memoir in the Lucy Boston book, the first of which was new to me -- it reminded me in many ways of Gwen Raverat's Period Piece, though Boston is more fierce in her independence and tart in her manner, even as a child. I will probably never get tired of leafing dreamily through Ben Pentreath's book, which seems to me to illustrate pretty much exactly what a comfortable home best looks like. The small lives of women throughout history interests me, and so now I've just started The Jamestown Brides, about the literal shipment of fifty-six young women who volunteered their futures -- they were to be bartered off as brides -- in exchange for passage to the New World in 1621. More to come!
I am a great admirer of Isabella Tree and hope that what she and her husband have started will get the ball rolling and we can reclaim our country again.
I am unsure of the colours on your stitching...
Posted by: Toffeeapple | November 12, 2019 at 08:03 AM