The little tea shop inside the Antique Centre has now opened for business, with three tables, a few plates of cakes and an urn for hot water. Jackie, who was selling Castello de Haia soaps in the Buttermarket with the Artisans of Hay, reminded me of it, so I went in to look.
I've just finished a lucetted project - a long medieval style belt in two colours - and I thought I might get back into some blackwork. I used to do quite a bit, but gave up because I couldn't afford to get them properly framed, and couldn't do the job myself. Now I'm more confident of my framing abilities, and I fancy doing a picture of the space shuttle against a background of stars, maybe with Earth in blue and white underneath. Looking round the net, I found very few embroideries with a space theme, which made me more enthusiastic about trying it out.
I thought I'd have to go into Hereford to pick up some evenweave linen, since blackwork is counted thread work and you need a very regular background material, but then I remembered that Marina at The End has linen. It's antique French, and it's beautiful stuff (so it's not cheap!) - I just hope I can do it justice when I come to design the picture. While I was in there, I found an antique French spindle, too. Even though I don't do much re-enactment at the moment, I still find myself looking out for things I can use in demonstrations, and this was a style of spindle I didn't already have. I have the standard stick and disc hand spindle, in various sizes, and a Turkish spindle, like so:
The French style is quite different, and I'm looking forward to trying it out:
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