G[r]eek Alphabet : S is for Stars

I have been looking forward to R and S for several reasons. I like how well the design has come out but also because they are EASY. For a given value of easy of course as a friend pointed out. She doesn't think any of them are easy. But if you think of R2, I had to pin and sew the R out of ribbon but R2 was just one piece of felt (no hemming).

For stars we are even more low tech. Like K for Kraken there is only a letter to applique and then it's all in the embroidery and here the embroidery is even simpler. A few stars, a few lines. Yes the S itself is curvy which takes some doing with a straight flat ribbon but basically there isn't a lot. As a bonus I now had an opaque black fabric thanks to a surprise donation from a friend out of nowhere.

Thus there is not much for me to show you for this as I didn't do any early photos...at least I thought I'd snapped it with just the S sewn down but I can't find it and to be honest, it's not really much of a before shot.

Callisto, Zeus and Ursa Major and Ursa Minor

The constellation depicted on this letter is sometimes called Ursa Major, to go with the constellation Ursa Minor, and sometimes The plough. It also can be used to find the North Star in the sky.

It's another tale of Zeus on his seduction track, with the girl getting transformed this time instead of Zeus. She has a fling with Zeus, gets pregnant but her virginal boss/friend Artemis is mad and turns her into a bear. Later having had her son Arkas, she nearly gets killed by him as he fails to realise she isn't a bear, and to save the situation both are made into starry constellations.

Source : Theoi Callisto : Princess of Arcadia

More info on other names for the same constellation on the wikipedia page The Big Dipper. Funny how the page is named for the name given by white north Americans as opposed to anyone else who has given it a name.

G[r]eek Alphabet : R is for R2D2!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Certain characters get a lot of love when I post them. At some point I will do a grid of how many facebook likes I get per character and time of day posted.Yes I am that obsessive.

ANYway. People seem to like R2, I know I do and so does my Mum.

Sometimes I run into a problem because I tend to only think a few stages ahead. I had carefully gone to look up the colours of R2's accoutrements and I realised he had a grey head. At first I was like whatever! I'll just embroider it in later, then I started on the head and I kind of liked it in white and I was starting to go off the idea of embroidering the grey. I asked for a few opinions, and everyone was very sweet about the fact that I'd got the colour wrong.

Then later I had this idea...laundry pens, ink designed to be washed and be permanent. I tested the pen on the back of one of the feet where it wouldn't matter aaaaaaaaand hey presto! Grey head for R2.

The patterning is semi made up based on a picture I don't know if I posted previously

I also revisited nostalgia with the following pic

G[r]eek Alphabet : Q is for Queens

It's a busy day today - I gots 3 updates for you for the letters Q, R and S. The end is nigh....or something. Actually I'm at 19 out of 30 so I guess I'm sort of 2/3 of the way I guess which is pretty cool.

I had decided on that purple from C for cat as the Q. This was not going to be my favourite thing on account of the pins. I decided to make use of the fact that the Q is broken by the figures in it to cover up the fact that I didn't have a piece of purple large enough to go round. I decided (I think my Mum might have hinted) that I would tack rather than pinning. This helped immensely.

Tacking is when you sew something loosely and don't knot the threads so you can remove it once you've done the real sewing. I did mine in contrasting colours so I wouldn't accidentally pin the tacking in place by sewing over it.

I then got on to the figures. I immediately hit a snag - the figures are extremely small and despite my original ideas for the arms and seated position of the figures, I didn't think I could make them work in cloth. I had to simplify the shape to fit what I could achieve more easily in cloth.

It also helped cover up a gap I'd left in the wrong place for the new arrangement.

I did consider leaving the faces blank but I didn't like it.

Why Queens?

There are two entertaining Queens in Alice through the looking glass :the Red and the White.

My favourite scene with the Red Queen is the one where Alice has become a Queen but can't eat anything because she keeps being introduced to the food.

My favourite scene for the White Queen (apart from the jam quote obviously) is the dreamlike riverboat sequence with the shop.

G[r]eek Alphabet : P is for Pomegranate and Persephone

I wasn't entirely convinced by this design when I came to make this one. It was neat but a bit quiet and uncomplex  after some of the designs I've made.

I did debate returning to my original plan with the pomegranate below the P and Persephone's dress as she runs away but I didn't like it. I didn't want to mess up the P and turn it into a B.

As always I dithered over the colour of the letter because I couldn't use a reddish colour due to the reds in the pomegranate and I didn't want too pale a colour. None of my blues seemed appropriate either.

This photo is one I took to be able to think more on the colour of the letter while at work creating Odin.

The problem with the green I decided to use is it is technically for putting curtain hooks on curtains which means it's thick and lumpy and twice the width I wanted meaning I had to double it over to use it. I sewed the ribbon for the outside of the pomegranate to the inside flesh colour fabric and then sewed the P down quite fast as I couldn't use pins very easily on such a thick wedge of material.

So then I was on to the seeds and the spaces where seeds had been. It worked out quite well that this was going to be done over the top in embroidery because I hadn't managed to keep the white very flat while sewing down the P. I only have so many fingers. I had decided that the seeds would be made out of large decorative knots and the spaces of where seeds used to be would be small sewn stitches in circles.

I was worried that the knots would take a long time and had doubled up the thread to make extra quick large knots. It meant I went through thread fast but the knots actually went pretty quickly as did the empty places where seeds had been.

 The final design decision was to add an extra bit of pink around the end of the P to add some definition to the letter.

Mythology spot

So what has a pomegranate got to do with Persephone? This is a classic abduction story from Greek mythology. Hades kidnaps Persephone and makes her his Queen. Her mother Demeter hunts for him and begs Zeus to get her daughter back. Persephone pines for the above world and refuses to eat anything in the underworld. When Zeus intervenes to get her back Hades says she can go back if she hasn't eaten anything....Persephone says she hasn't but the gardener says she has - she has eaten half the seeds of a pomegranate. However Hades still lets her go back but only for half the year. Or something along those lines. Thus the seasons are born. It's summer and spring when she comes above ground and autumn and winter when she is in the underworld as Demeter - a harvest goddess is sad.

Other fun Persephone facts - in some source(s) she is said to be the creator of human life instead of Prometheus, and sometimes she is said not to be Demeter's daughter but Zeus and Styx (the River that takes you to the underworld).

All this and more from the Theoi article on Persephone : Greek queen of the underworld and spring

Crazy factoid about me and Pomegranates

I had never eaten pomegranate until about 5 years ago. As a child I read this myth and wondered why she was eating the seeds and not the fruit. Having eaten one, mystery solved! That's what you eat in a pomegranate!!

G[r]eek Alphabet : O is for Odin

Odin is one of only 3 characters from northern or Norse mythology in the alphabet. He's quite simple with not a lot in the design to signify who he is. A friend of mine who is Asian and not UK born saw it and thought it was Jesus because of the beard which amused me. I have debated adding a raven but I really like the background fabric I chose and it's a tough one to sew through being a fake kind of leather thing.

I have a couple of photos but I think I will just share the final product because there isn't much to see in the others that's much different.

My main craft choice was that because the backing fabric is so tough, I would do as much sewing as I could before I attached the design to it. This meant I sewed Odin's beard and hair to his face and sewed his face to the O before I attached it to the base fabric. This is, as you have seen, mostly not how I do things.

At one stage I was going to make Odin's hair fill the inside of the O but I changed my mind. I kind of like it better this way.

A last minute decision that may not be so visible on camera is that having made Odin slightly bumpy I decided to fill him out a bit and make his face 3D. It's fun little detail when you look at it with your eye and fingers.

Mythology spot

Why then, does Odin only have one eye you ask? Funny you should ask that, well Odin gave up his eye in exchange for the chance to gain wisdom by drinking from a well beneath Yggdrasil, the world tree.

For a fuller description see Norse Mythology - Why Odin is One-Eyed - not a bad site considering I found it by just googling right now. It cites primary sources, even if it doesn't link to online translations of those primary sources. Props though to Dan McCoy for a very scholarly site.

This little corner is something I may well go back and retroactively add to other posts!

G[r]eek Alphabet : N is for Narcissus

I am currently a bit behind on blog posts as I'm now about to start on Q, but that means you get lots of posts all in one go! Lucky lucky you ;-)

As I started this one I was a little concerned. I was adding a design onto a busy patterned cloth and I didn't want the main design to be overwhelmed by that and I didn't want to change the background. I spent some time choosing the right colours as always and although I really wanted to use ribbon for the reduced hassle the right colour for the letter was dark blue so that meant a lot of pinning

I also slightly simplified the leaves because both the letter and the green which was to overlap the letter required lots and lost of pins. The upside I guess of lots of pins is that I'm in a desperate hurry to get rid of them, so I sew quite fast.

This is the half way stage.

Because I was so fed up of pins by this point I decided not to use a cloth needing hemming for the daffodil as having pinned everything including the pond I'd had enough! I did make the trumpet slightly 3 D by using a loop of ribbon and not sewing all of the front part down.

I think that's all I can say really!!

To keep you going on this one, I link you to the fabulous Theoi Library site (one of my new favourite sites for Greek Myth info) and to Ovid's Metamorphoses Book 3 for the myth of Echo and Narcissus - the man who fell in love with his own reflection.

Extra fun linky - a Geek and Sundry vlogger Dael Kingsmill talks about the Narcissus myth

G[r]eek Alphabet : M is for Medusa

The first thing that happened when I started making this one was I felt that although I liked my design as a drawing I was not looking forward to making or embroidering the snakes so small and so many.

 
So I decided I needed to make her head larger so the snakes could be larger and easier and played with how this would work.

With this first test sketch I was hoping it would have more of a Scarlet Witch type effect. Like this image:

But it didn't entirely work with the v of the M hitting Medusa's head.

So then I thought of bringing her head down further.

The hair and style is influenced by ancient Greek Pottery designs of Medusa.

So then I thought I better make her a little smaller and thought I'd bring her to one side like Athena in A or Heracles in H.

This brought in a new issue - what was I going to do with her snake hair so that it doesn't obscure the M too much? At first I thought the hair might be OK if the M was strong enough.
I started colour testing it with a strong red coloured letter M and making her hair go different ways.

This final sketch made it clear to me that most of the hair would have to be behind the M.

Then it was back to materials. I had chosen this funky fun stretchy cord that was shiny but it was also quite pale and the background cloth was pale yellow, so I went back to option 2 - green felt as I couldn't face hemming up all the snakes.

I did debate making her darker but I was already a bit edgy that the one bad person (or nasty character) on the alphabet was a woman, I didn't fancy making the one black woman in the selection a monster. I had some additional debates about including such a scary character as well at all at this point but decided kids like a few monsters. I was also cheered by finding on a funky classics website that in some versions Medusa is just born a monster rather than a punishment for pride and beauty! See Theoi : Medusa and the Gorgons which includes translated primary source literary references.

After that it was pretty simple to make being mainly ribbon and felt.

When I came to pin down the dress/top I was getting fed up with the way the pins buckle the fabric when you are using such a small piece. I used a technique that would normally only be used to pin things in place on a cushion - see below pins like studs

 From the back you can see the pins look like a hedgehog but they were very easy to avoid and sewing went quickly meaning you could get rid of them pretty quickly.

 So there we go! She's done! I may add in some shoulder brooches. I haven't decided at this point. I rather like her. Specially the eyes and forked tongues on the snakes.

I even looked up whether snakes have pink tongues - some certainly seem to!