I am well aware that, o gentle reader, that all your waking (and other) concerns over the past week have been over my lack of a camera. Well, you can stop fretting now, for today, almost a week later than expected, the little parcel arrived in my (grubby) little hands.
I had been saving up for an all-singing, all-dancing, super-dee-dooper camera with lenses and any other available extras, and then, within two days, my camera left this world and I received a commission to paint a painting, for which I received the exact price of this little beauty: (I love these perfect synchronicities, that always come at just the right time)
My brother William used to have this Lumix model, and, while I know that you have to have an “eye” for taking good photos, (and he most certainly does) he raved about this camera (and has subsequently upgraded the model)
So I am trying to figure out how to use this delight
(no matter that the instructions are in French (!!) ) and hence these photos are a little wonky colour-wise. But they will do to show you what I’m doing on this 8th day of December.
(As an aside, I subscribe to a most beautiful blog of Jan Richardson, “The Advent Door”.
(Artwork by Jan Richardson)
She wrote of this day:
“There are few things more powerful than finding ourselves in a situation beyond our imagining, and encountering someone who knows, from the inside of it, something of what it is to be in that place. Someone who can meet us there.
Pregnant in strange and wondrous circumstances, Mary and Elizabeth each find perhaps the only other person who could possibly understand what’s happening to them. With one another, they find not just understanding (though that would be gift enough), not just hospitality (though that would be mercy enough); in one another, they find a shelter; in their meeting, they make a sanctuary.
In moments, Mary will raise her voice in an ancient song. Singing, after all, is part of what a sanctuary is for. In the relief and release she finds in Elizabeth’s welcome, Mary is freed to let loose with her words about the Word that is within her, and to pour forth her poetic proclamation of what God has wrought in her and in the world”
This ancient song, is “Magnificat”; years ago I sang with a choir in St Canice’s Cathedral in Kilkenny, and the Magnificat gives me goosebumps now, as it did then: have a listen to it here)
Anyway, this is some of the work I was doing today-
a tea cosy lined in Bainin wool; and:
I wanted to have a go at machine sewing with embroidery floss- this is a technique my friend Tara told me about and I’ve been thinking about all week… it is so effective and so simple!
You wind a bobbin with embroidery floss and sew as normal… apart from having to sew “upside down”- (being conscious of the fact that the embroidery floss effect will be on the “bottom” of what you sew, if you know what I mean!)
More photos tomorrow, and I just might, in celebration of the New Camera, make another tutorial for another gift idea… 🙂
(oh, and : ♥ !)
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