It’s spooky season again! I am leaving the windows open on cool days, and drinking lots of my favorite cinnamon-spiced tea. Making apple sauce on the stove with lots of pie spice added, and putting off the work of cleaning up after the declining flowers on my patio.
I love my local library. Libraries are great. Appreciate a librarian today!
This week I started learning to make oya, a traditional needle lace from Türkiye. “Needle lace” means it is made with a sewing needle, rather than a crochet hook or bobbins. Oya is made from a series of knots, so it’s difficult to undo. I’m working from a book, linked below, and various YouTube videos that have helped me figure out places where I misunderstood the diagrams.
I started with some leftover size 10 crochet cotton and a tapestry needle just to get the hang of it. Here you can see my many errors!
Many errors arranged in a circle, roughly in order of progress starting at the leftmost point. The first one is just a bit of shredded crochet cotton with stray knots in it. At the end of the circle you can see I finally created a tube, which is part of the first project I’m working on.
My beginner oya is more tightly packed and dense than the photos online. Which is mostly the way I do a lot of needle arts. Tiny things are me. I’m not going to worry about it.
Last night I finally succeeded in making a good-looking tube, which will form the stem of an apple blossom. In theory!
A tube made from green crochet thread, tapered at one end. And my fingertips, for scale. My hands are feeling scruffy these days, mostly because I cut the pad of one thumb a couple of weeks ago and it is still healing. Ouch.
ephemera
Today’s moon: waning gibbous 🌖
Reading: Od Magic, Patricia McKillip, 2005. This re-read is very comforting, both because it’s a great story and because the writing craft is so much better than many books I’ve encountered lately.
Learning: Needle Lace Flowers, Figen Cakir, 2013.