The Turtle Continues, and the Three Part Purse

This turtle is traveling at her own pace, nice and slowwwwww. But it's a great project for trying out stitches and colors and generally doing things from either long ago or never. I dug out a couple of needlepoint books I've had lying around for oh maybe 40 years or more -- the price on the Elsa Williams tells me it's practically antique, to renew my acquaintance with needlepoint stitching.

And those lovely crocheted pieces I acquired via Freecycle a while back? astute observers will have noticed that the new toilet in the Ds. TeePee Caper has a lovely lace thingie on the tank, very posh, and that the Ds are wearing lacy hats....and there are several summer purses in the works. Aside from various chests and things with beautiful runners on them, under glass.

One purse is this, a three part one, each part stitched up separately



and lined with some exciting Chinese type satin fabric from another freecycle. Crocheted loop for the eventual button, probably a nice tourmaline bead, and I still have to decide how to join the three into a single purse.



click to enlarge

And if it needs a handle. Each purse is a crocheted mat thing, probably a chair arm cover or maybe a dressing table mat. But I like their new life.

The other motivation for this slow steady work is that days are a little hard right now, what with closing the estate account for HP, and yesterday getting yet more preprinted forms from the state with his information on them, now no longer valid, and having to write and put them right yet again about the ownership of the property. It all drives home my singleness yet again, and though most days this is okay, some days it is lonely.

So it helps to just set stitch after stitch, listening to Anna Quindlen on CD with her latest book of essays, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake, at least I think that's it, it's on another floor from where I now am.

She's an interesting writer, though blind to her privileges, but she's far from the only writer to assume that everyone's an affluent baby boomer, with too much stuff, and too many houses! however, she does get in some wonderful lines that are worth mining. Like her brief flirtation in the 70s with Fiesta ware and Roseville pottery, which made me guffaw totally, remembering my own similar one and the later recoiling!

I wish they'd got someone other than the writer to do the reading, though. Some writers have wonderful voices and are easy to listen to. She has this hoarse, nervous voice, reads like a metronome, and oh well. I've heard her on radio discussing her work and she's wonderful to listen to in conversation,but the reading seems to have put her into Reading Mode. She admitted that she hates to revisit her own work, and reading it aloud, even harder for her. So why on earth agree to do it, I wonder. At this stage she has plenty of clout to say, no, I think we should get Meryl Streep, or something.

I wonder if I should name my turtle..