whenmari: Embroidery and the East Coast

Another goal I've got for this year is to do more of what I already do and love: baking, taking photos of nature and places we visit, doing more crochet, weaving and embroidery.

As a teenager I used to do a lot of cross-stitch, which for a Romanian youngster in the 90's was a new and exotic craft. Traditional Romanian embroidery and needlecraft is wonderfully rich and varied, and I was also familiar with needlepoint tapestry, as I grew up admiring a couple of really beautiful ones created by my mother, but cross-stitch in the British and American contemporary style was something entirely new for us, and my sister and I spent hours working on projects big and small.

In the latter years, however, I find myself really drawn to a more 'freestyle' embroidery using traditional stitches, and also to Japanese sashiko.

Last year though I worked on precious little, and I think I've only got this small piece to show right now, it's an ATC I made for a swap organised by Ali Burdon of Very Berry:

Sakura

It's a little picture I made out of wool roving, wet- and needle-felted, and embellished with straight and lazy daisy stitches and French knots.

Instead of stitching, I've been buying a good number of lovely books about it! :) I'll maybe talk a bit more about them in a future post.

Another superb source of inspiration I encountered last year was The Great Tapestry of Scotland, which I had the good fortune to see in September, when it was exhibited at the Scottish Parliament in Edinburgh. I even took the opportunity to put a few stitches into the People's Panel! :)

The Great Tapestry is an amazing work of art, and you can read more about it here if you'd like! I was browsing the pictures I took at the exhibition, looking for a favourite to share here, and this one caught my eye:

It is about the women who used to work as fish-gutters - a difficult and certainly very smelly job - but between the two world wars, in the fishing villages around Scotland, this seasonal employment was a welcome source of additional income, even if the hours were long and the wages low.

The two lines of verse come from The Fish-Gutter's Sang, a song in the Scots Language and a very 'colourful' work of art in its own right :)

I love the beautiful design of the panel, and exquisite colours and stitches! I also really like the little cameos of marine creatures and fishermen's jumpers! :D

When I first saw it, I remember feeling quite chuffed (to use a cute Scottish phrase :p ) that I recognized almost all the place names around the picture, but not only that - I had actually visited a good few of them! Pittenweem, Anstruther and Crail are in Fife, towards St Andrews - and my husband and I have many happy memories of that area! Last spring we went further up north for our holiday, to Gardenstown, and visited Fraserborough, Cullen and Portsoy.

A reason I love the east coast of Scotland so much is because it's got 'real sea'! :D To this Romanian child, who spent numerous bright, hot, summer days on the beaches of the Black Sea, the sea is the sea if that's all you can see all the way to the far horizon. If there are lots of little islands dotted here and there and blocking the view, as it often happens on the west coast, lovely they may be, but for me the 'real sea' only starts beyond them! :) Now, there are islands on the east coast too, and yet, there are lots more uninterrupted swathes of waves to satisfy my soul :)

I'll leave you for now, then, with a few photos I took of some of the lovely places we've been to so far on the east coast: