It has been a while since the last post. But I keep going. After all, I have a reputation for stubborn persistence to uphold.

First, here’s a shot of the whole Anything Could Happen sampler, unrolled, as it was just before I began the current strip.

A few things to note. First, there is much less room remaining at top and bottom that needs to be filled. In fact, I have shorted myself. I should have chosen narrower strips than the pomegranate meander and the strange monsters band. I still intend to work a full width strip above and below what’s there, plus a narrower matching border as the final top and bottom framing mechanism – probably in blue. That means I will go over my basted edge lines. I may even have to finish with a hand hoop because I will run out of real estate for the flat frame by the time I get to those final edgings.

Second, the yellow step voiding behind the lettering still doesn’t reach all the way to the side edges. Right now that’s on purpose. The piece is a tribute to the science fiction book currently being written by my Resident Male. Those areas on either side of the motto lines are small, but they are big enough to contain a custom motif or two directly relating to book content. And I might use one or two of them as signature or date blocks. In either case, I will be drawing up new content, and won’t fill in the background yellow until the foreground material has been completed.

Third, that rippled left edge. That’s an artifact of Doing Something Wrong. I had this happen once before, but not for many years. I hand-hem my edges. Occasionally I get lazy and leave the selvedge edge unhemmed. A big mistake. That means that the left and right edges of the piece have different stretch potential (hemming limiting stretch more than the native woven bolt edge). When that happens, distortion, stretching, and fraying can occur. When I frame the piece with fabric as a hanging scroll, I will take pains to do it in a manner that covers up those flaws. Nothing else I can do about it until then.

And now we get to the part that you want to see. The latest strip. This one is a play on the Spider Flower I’ve discussed here before. There are many iterations of this Azemmour Cluster design. I included a chart normed from multiple repeats of one of them in my Second Carolingian Modelbook, as Plate 33:4.

This one is being done in black and cranberry, but a bit differently from the obviously related Pomegranate Meander I used earlier (Second Carolingian Modelbook, Plate 34:1). For one, I am now sure that I will have enough thread to do a properly cushy rendition of long armed cross stitch. Using two plies of the Au Ver a Soie Soie d’Alger gives the proper well filled plaited look to the ground. I have also gotten a bit better at splitting and re-spinning the Tied to History Allori reeled silk, so the black lines are more uniform in appearance. Always fun to pick up a new skill.

These designs are both fast and slow to work up. Slower than many double running stitch strips because of all of those little disassociated filling bits that make up the decorative “chaff” inhabiting the foreground, but faster than many others due to the simple nature of the outlines themselves. I admit that chaff is a pain in the neck to do, impossible to terminate individually due to their small size and scattered placement, and annoying to path plan while minimizing skips. But again, I’m stubborn beyond words. One reason I had put off playing with this pattern family for so long was dealing with the chaff. No longer.

Health Update

Obviously I have weathered the latest round of surgery. The last procedure to shave down my cranial chordoma manifestation was quite lengthy – over 21 hours. But it was as effective as it could have been given the delicate location and nature of the beast. Getting most of it means there are leftovers that will be addressed via an aggressive program of proton and photon radiation. So next week it’s back to daily visits to rad therapy for the better part of a month and a half.

I can say that I continue to improve on a daily basis. Right after surgery I was particularly discreditable – a massive black eye that looked like a boxing souvenir, for starters. Lots of other swelling and seam-like scars just inside my hairline. Double vision at distance when I could peek at the world with two eyes; and with the swollen right side of my face, the eye being squeezed tightly I couldn’t open it, little to no useful vision on the right.

Now I look mostly normal.

Stitches are all out, the bruising and most of the swelling is gone. Zero cognitive effects, no headaches, no balance or hearing issues. I’ve kicked the double vision, and the right eye’s useful productivity has returned to my nearsighted normal. Which explains why I was able to finish the monsters and start on the new strip.

My continuing physical improvement challenge is to rebuild strength and mobility. I can get around the house but slowly, but am not quite in the shape to do all the simple chores like gardening I was able to accomplish just a month ago. Again stubbornness works in my favor. I refuse to be defined by what I can no longer do, so every day I work towards making that list just a bit shorter.