Share Your Thimbles November 2010 closed

This month I am prompt and now announcing that this month's "Share Your Thimble" at Flickr is officially closed.  I haven't closed the group at Flickr, but the message board, so you still can upload your photos to show us what you have made.  As a matter of fact, the photo sharing group is never closed.

We have five people who shared their work with us this month:  coral-seas who showed us her very first thimble, Temari Debi with her beautiful blue fins on brown thimble, Dorian E who shared us with her two thimbles this month, not beads, beadtutle with her lovely gold fish big rings, and suryaismail with her yellow and orange bead which she said look like trilobites but far lovelier than ancient creatures.  I would like to thank everyone who visited our group and left comments on our works.  I realize that Flickr has a new function of "recent activity" and we can see when signed in that someone has left a comment on the photo. 

As promised, one lucky winner will get my contribution of thimble to this month's photo sharing.  We  have four entries this month and ...

The winner of November is number 1, coral-seas.  Congratulations, coral-seas, will you please send me an e-mail for your full name and shipping address?  You can find my e-mail address in the profile page.  

Did you know that this was the 12th "Share Your Thimbles" this month?  I started the group in December 2009 and next month is our first anniversary.  I welcome any suggestion to improve the group, especially on how to promote our activities.  The fact that the thimble making is not very popular is a problem, not that people loathes it or anything, they just don't know what they are missing is all, I think. 

*** Shop Update ***

I have listed three of  "First Thimble Kit" at my Etsy store if you are interested.  If you placed your order now, I think they will still arrive in time for Holiday.  As for "Starter Kit with (almost) everything you need",  I appreciate your patience, it will take a little longer before it becomes available.

Can you tell the difference?

Following the previous post, I experimented on the same designed pin cushion bases.  For those of you who didn't read the previous post, one of the instructors from my embroidery course suggested that I might want to consider inserting a smidgen of emerald green in the stripes when I brought  it (the right one in the photo) to the course Here are the results of my experiment:

This is the original one, in solid dark olive and gold, I put the small patch on the photo so that you can see the olive green thread I used.  I like it as it is, maybe a bit too subdued, but I like the colour combination and it looks good, if I may say so myself.

Then,  I used the celadon for the last round of the center square for the second one.  My instructor suggested emerald green and his suggestion in colour choice is always spot-on, however, I thought emerald is a touch too strong a colour, especially when the design requires the thread has to appear not only the square part but all the strips parts, too. 

I regret that I didn't take step by step photo, but it was really an interesting process.  As you can see (or you may not see),  the strips (and squares) are formed from the centre.  After two rounds of dark olive green, the celadon come, and the whole green part appeared as if it was solid emerald green.  Then three rounds of gold and I realized that the whole ring was in the colour of peacock feathers.  It was like a WOW moment.  Then two rounds of dark olive green and it was totally changed again, with dark olive lying side by side with amethyst and it made amethyst deeper, richer.  Another WOW. I wanted to stop there but I had to add another gold, not only for the sake of experiment, but for the completion of the design as it required another round of stitches.  The celadon is subtle but it makes the design more interesting for sure.

The third one, with emerald green.  I am sorry that the photo is a bit blurry.  I was quite happy with the second one with celadon, but I wanted to see what it would be like with emerald green in it.  I was right to think that emerald green would be too strong for this design and that he hadn't understood how the design was formed and emerald green had to appear all the way in the stripes and square.  He is a embroiderer and I think he wanted to add a bit of emerald green here and there, and not like this, although this is the brightest one and I suppose it's not too bad.

I would like to make another one with celadon and without the last round of gold.  It requires a little tweaking of the design, unless I want to replace the gold with the third round of olive green, and I do not.  Perhaps adding a little more gold may be the answer, I have to think about it.

flower basket -- update IV + another pin cushion

The basket itself is finally finished, and so are branches of plum flowers.  So it leaves me no option but to work on chrysanthemums and peonies leaves.  I am not very happy with these leaves as they are now, to be honest, and that's why I have not been very keen on working on them so far.  I can choose to redo them, of course, but I really don't want to.  My instructor told me that they were not bad, that I have just finished the "ground work" so what I needed to do  was to "beautify" them.  I am not really sure about it, though.  He, however, told me that I had better redo one of the daffodil leaves, the longest one on the top, and I quite agree.

Here is another pin cushion, in the (almost) same design but in different colours and size.  Thank you, Lady of the Lock and Laura B. for your kind words on my previously listed pin cushion in pink.  This one still glitters a lot but it doesn't bother me as much as the previous one does, possibly because I just don't like the combination of that particular shade of pink and gold, is all. 

I brought it to the embroidery class to show it off, and the instructor suggested that I might want to insert a little bit of emerald green in the gold and dark green stripes part, so that it would bring the purple brighter.  His suggestion in colours is always reliable so I am making exactly the same one right now but with a row of emerald green, so that I could compare the effect the brighter green is supposed to provide.

on-line advertisement

The web service which offers something free, either blog or social network, or anything, got advertisements.  Do you pay attention to them?

I generally do not.  However, the two advertisements caught my eyes the other day.

One was on-line printing service offering free business cards printing.  I have always wanted nice business cards for my shop so I decided to investigate it.  It turned out that "free" is for the basic grade paper and I still had to pay for the processing fee.  I was not sure if you could still call it free, but I was intrigued enough to look further, and found out that with a small fee I could custom order the cards and look what I got;

The other was for photo books which offered limited time discount.  Naturally, I had a lot of photographs which I should have already dealt with.  So here are my first photo books:

(There are two because the second one was for my companion)



(We had a dim sum making class at the hotel kitchen during our stay)

a make a month November 2010

This is my latest pin cushion base ring, in detail.  I have finished stitching the pin flower (windmill) part months ago but never finished the background until two days ago. 

I used gold thread for Japanese embroidery and perhaps it's a little too glittery, don't you think?

Share Your Thimbles -- November 2010

It's time to start stitching your thimbles again and here is a link to Flickr to share your work with the group.

This is a photo sharing group called "Share Your Thimbles" and if you make Japanese silk thimbles (or any other rings using the same technique, I would love to have you join us.  This is not a contest nor competition and definitely no critics.  Anyone is welcome.

General Rules:

1. The thimbles (or any other rings) have to be your own work.

2. Although the group name says "thimbles", your work is not necessarily a thimble and you can make your rings in any size you would like, as small as a focal bead for the necklace or as big as a bracelet, or even bigger.

3. As stated above, they have to be your own work however, you can use the ring base from the kit if you choose to do so. It may not seem to be fair, considering I sell the kits, however, they are many other kits available (at least in Japan) and some of you may be able to obtain them, and it is definitely not fair to exclude the people brave enough to share their first work with us from the group.

4. Your work has to be done with only forward stitches. No weaving or back stitches at this time.

5. You can use any material, and in any colours, you would like.

6. Please state the size of the mould on which you formed your ring base in the description field of the photo. Please also mention what threads and padding you used, too, so that we could compare notes. In case you bought one of my kits, here are the size and materials: "first thimble" is 50mm in circumference and Tire Silk size 9 & floss silk padding. "small pincushion" is 61mm in circumference and Tire Silk size9 & floss silk padding. "medium pincushion" is 103mm and Tire Silk size 16 & knitting yarn for padding.

7. You can upload as many photo as you like. You can upload several photos of one thimble if you choose to do so.

8. The closing date is 21st of November 2010, Japan time. Please note that we are 9 hours ahead of GMT (Greenwich Mean Time) in Japan.  Though you can still upload your photo after the official closing date since I do not close the photo sharing pool.  However I do close the discussion board for entry to the lucky draw.

Now you can start uploading your photos from here.


We are going to have a lucky draw at the end this month, too. One lucky winner will receive the thimble of my contribution to this month's photo sharing which shown as above, one is pink stripes with white fins. In order to enter the draw, please leave a message at the discussion board at Flickr under the subject of "Thimbles of November 2010". As stated above, you can upload as many photos as you like however, you can enter the draw only once.

The winner of the draw will be announce here at my blog, not at the Flicker, by the end of the month. 
For those of you who are not a thimble stitcher or who chose not to join the group this month, you can still participate in the group as we participants of the group would love to have your comments left to the photos uploaded. When you click the photo at Flickr, you will find a dialogue box in which to leave your comment. I (and I believe you, too) would be so excited when someone left me a comment. Please come visit us here.