Embroidery

I have been attending an embroidery workshop since a couple weeks. I was mostly chating last week so did not achieve much. The above pieces are from my first week. We have a lovely young and talented instructor and the atmospher is very cozy. Tomorrow I shall be attending the third session and am taking a few of my white embroidery books with the hope that our instructor may volunteer to train herself to train us :)

I am taking something else with me ... A mnyam mnyam "banana bread" that just came out of the oven ... I have modified the recipe; reduced oil & sugar; added my own mix of speculaas and loads of walnut :) et voila!

My New Scarf To Be

It is known that if the sunset is pinkish red, the next day is expected to be wonderful. And indeed it has been a beautiful day with lots of sunshine and tranquillity. Today I have taken pictures of the new chevron scarf I am knitting. It is majorly a corn yellow with random bouclettes of purple, pink, salmon, brown, green and blue. The label reads 30% Wool and Mohair each, 10% Viscose and 30% Acryl ... It is growing real fast. I think I shall have a new scarf in two days :) I am knitting this 50 gr skein with needles No. 7 ... It is 45 stitches measuring 25 cm (10 inches) width. I plan to knit it long :)

Squirrels

It will probably be quite hard to believe if I told you that the squirrels of this geography do not know walnuts. Well ... I guess that is normal if there are no walnut (trees) around. I also realized that I have to crush them before serving cause the first time that I had placed walnuts on a tree, they were untouched the following days. That led me to think that the squirrels did not know what to do with them.

Bon Appetit!

And the wonderful sunset today from our patio :)

Camels

Today was the Camel Wrestling competition not far from where we live. As stated in Wikipedia, "Camel wrestling is a sport in which two male camels wrestle in response to a female camel in heat being led before them. ..."

A folkloric Anatolian tradition, now specific to Aegean region ...

I really do not understand what makes it a sport cause almost everyone leaves the arena completely drunk, but indeed a very colourful event where all camels are colourfully decorated. The camels with their mouths full of saliva bubbles, either push one another or make rounds until one surrenders or is forced to kneel. The loser often will run into the crowd of spectators causing panic as onlookers try not to get trampled. This is the fun part in my case :) where there is a higher risk on people than the animals themselves. I really hate to see how people take advantage of the poor camels especially in their weak moments. Another thing I very much dislike the most is that they sell camel sausages (as you would see on the forth picture below) while they BBQ them for the spectators. The poor camels wrestle while breathing the smoke of their cooked relatives or once acquantances and trying real hard to win the heart of the female that will continue their race.

I had been to one of the camel wrestling festivals again held at the same place some years ago and had taken some pictures ...

Now that we're talking about camels, I really have no idea how they ended up at the neighbouring territory behind but we had some very happy moments with the visiting camels a few years ago which is not very usual to see any more. In fact, it was the only time I have seen them over the six years that we've been living here.

Mail Art

Today I want to introduce the small mail art made for a wonderful lady I met while in Holland last year. It took me a while to finish it because I wanted it to be something different. I used silk floss for the whole project and a bead crochet carnation with a mother-of-pearl button for the closure. Ever since I got to learn of darning, especially the darning samplers which I find fascinating, I chose to use a small darning pattern to enrich my little souvenir.

Happy New Year

This year I also decorated my book shelves &

Behiye wishes you all the very best in 2010!

We are having a very strange winter. The weather has been quite warm and all the trees are wondering if Spring is here. One of them is my lilac bush.  They had a bloom in the middle of December last. But the flowers are not the typical known shape, rather rounded.

The weather today is very windy but warm and sunny. So I decided to take some pictures from the garden while welcoming the new year :)

The big citrus tree and the fruits (they make great jam)

The lemons

Cumquat

Grapefruit

Orange

We also have lime and tangerine but the lime is too young to have fruits and we ate all the tangerines, so no pictures :)

Lavender

Ox Eye

Mimosa

And finally, the last finish of 2009 ... Made with  Himalaya Perlina ( %50 cotton %50 acrylic ) yarn. I had intended to knit a wonderful pattern "Ilga's Socks" but failed due to wrong choice of yarn. This particular yarn, which I was very pleased with, was not the best choice to use for the mentioned multi-colour pattern. So, ended up knitting with stripes. I may in future, look into stitching patterns on them!