A New Pulled Thread Book - in French

I received a dictionary of pulled thread stitches for my birthday last year. Unfortunately for me, it's written in French. The languages I studied at school were Engish, Afrikaans and Latin. I don't speak a word of French. Or Latin.

The first thing anyone says when I mention that the book is written in French is 'Just use Google Translate.' And certainly, I found the translations useful. It's when I got to the technical terms that things became less clear. One translation amused me. After all, does one really use 'wire' for pulled thread embroidery? I did sort that puzzle out pretty quickly though.

Mary Corbett's review of a needlelace book, translated from the original French, alludes to the tricky question of translating specialized embroidery terms in a meaningful way. I can see now that not only is a bilingual person required for the translation, but preferably one who is familiar with all the very specific terms too. You can see Mary's comments in her blog post here.  Anyway, overall, I think I got a fair sense of what the text in my new book is covering.

The book itself is beautifully designed and a pleasure to page through and study. The graphics are clear and self explanatory. There are also diagrams of how the back of each stitch should look which is useful for making sure that you are working the stitch in the correct direction and the right sequence of the steps. The depth of information and care with which it is presented is remarkable. I'm just sorry that my photos don't do it justice.

The book covers the basic pulled thread stitches beginning with Satin stitch, goes on to Four-sided stitch, and includes Wave stitch, Faggot stitch and a few others. There are also many variations of these basic stitches, together with a photo of the stitched example. Finally there are combination stitches also with beautifully embroidered stitch samples.

The book Jours fils à resserrés by Marie-Helene Jeanneau was published in 2019 by Neva. Sadly Marie-Helene passed away the previous year. The book is labelled Volume 1.  How I would love to have seen what she had planned for Volume 2. 

Although I got the gist of the book and the stitch diagrams were clear and easy to follow, I would still like to be able to accurately interpret every word.  I think there is a wealth of useful information and technical know-how tucked away in those (to me) unfathomable French terms. 

I contacted the publisher to enquire about an English version of the book. He did say that there was an intention to translate it at a future date, and that it may be published by another publisher. I'll keep a lookout for that.

'Till next time, happy stitching!

Leaf SAL and August Weather

August in Brisbane was windy. Very windy. The wind blew all the washing off the line on Monday.  Pehaps that's a reminder to use the pegs. We had a few days of dust storms too, when the skies were pink from morning till night with the dust blown in from the inland desert areas. You could taste the dry dust in the air, even inside the house. A little rain is forecast for the weekend. I hope it arrives.

My leaf SAL is almost done. The leaf of chain and French knots was one leaf that went fairly quickly -

once I'd settled on the colours. With each new leaf choosing the colours became more of a challenge. One consideration was that I wanted to avoid having clumps of a single colour all congregated in one small area of the embroidery. Sometimes the colours I had planned just didn't look right so I unpicked and changed them. 

Deviating from the suggested scroll stitch as an outline for my next leaf, I chose Portuguese knotted stem instead. Up close, I really like the way the knot pulls the two threads together and almost looks like a rope. For tying down the lattice filling I wanted the crosses to stand out. Eventually I took out the contrasting pink and settled on a close matching colour after all.

My final leaf is filled with interwoven cross.

What I found interesting while working on the SAL is that stitches that looked uninspiring to me when paging through stitch dictionaries, turned out to be quite intriguing when I stitched them. Interwoven cross was one of them. Doing that last little tug on the thread and seeing how the threads entwined was rather satisfying. But also, the random sprinkling of the crosses as a filling stitch reminded me at times of a star-studded sky, and at other times, a sparkling field of wild flowers. Interwoven cross is a pretty little filling stitch.

My goal of twenty leaves is done. I'll make up a cushion cover once I find a cushion inner and know what size to make it.

In case you're wondering about that big frame, it's a quilting frame. I used it only to stretch out and smooth the wrinkles in the embroidery so I could photograph it before it's been washed and ironed.

Thinking of the weekend and some spring rain reminds me that the pelargonium and the bromeliad in this pot suddenly sprang into bloom. Longer days and warmer weather is definitely on the way here. 

'Till next time, happy stitching!