My Creative Space

This week mine looks like this:




There's no creativity without tea and chocolate, is there? And yes, I do quite often carry my creative space around in the lid of a shoebox. Don't you? It allows me to follow the sun from window to window around the house. Here I am still embroidering my Unplanned Apron, or the Walking Sampler (or it will be Walking, I hope, if I get so far as to actually wear it).


If you go to Kootoyoo you can see other people's creative spaces too.

.

A dog, a woman, and a walnut tree...

Or in this case, a kitten, a lad and a walnut tree...
So, what is the offspring up to?




He's thrashing at the branches of a walnut tree with a big stick, of course (...the more you beat them, the better they be.... Well, don't blame me, I didn't write English proverbs).


And here's a small part of the harvest (which was a neighbourhood effort shared by all):






And look who came to see what was going on. He was born in the coal cellar in the basement. I love that one white whisker (so his mum can find him in the dark?)






Then his mum was calling him but he got stuck in the tree and offspring had to get him down.


Indoors? Needlework? Oooh, loads. Remember the curtains? Well, after I cut them short enough to fit at the window without annoying me when I'm at the sink, there was loads of left-over fabric. So I made an apron. And then I thought, "Boring apron! Very plain." And I started to embroider it a little. No plan, I just sketched on it with a washable pen and went for it. So here it is in progress....

The left-hand pocket was directly inspired by this. The right-hand pocket you will see has been unpicked at the bottom to make it easier to work. Yes, yes, I know you should embroider it before you sew it together, but that's if you have a plan. No plan at all here, remember.

The sunflower is in spiral trellis stitch. You can download Tricia Nguyen's brilliantly clear instructions here. My variation is to do the centres with one strand of dark brown floss and one strand of brownish gold perle cotton to get that kind of stripey colour of sunflower seeds. The spiral trellis stitch gives exactly that kind of spiralling effect that you get in sunflower heads. For the petals I used two layers of detached chain in two different shades of yellow.

Close up on the first sunflower head:

I've done a bit more than this today (we're on our Eid holiday here in Turkey) but my camera batteries are dead and I am too lazy to walk to the shops to get new ones today. Hopefully, I'll be able to post pics of the finished apron in a couple of days. Have a good holiday, if you're having one.

Oh, and I didn't beat the kitten, or the offspring..... only the tree got beaten....

Counted work by Istanbul stitchers

As promised (long ago, I admit) here are a few of the photos from the exhibition of arts and crafts that I went to in June.

This first set is what is known in Turkish as "hesab ishi" or counted work. The pieces are are from the ISMEK show in the Feshane. ISMEK is an educational body that provides a lot of adult education and training in Istanbul (and three cheers for ISMEK and all their teachers and students - they really achieve absolute wonders). The Feshane is an old fez factory by the side of the Golden Horn in Istanbul. It has been converted into an exhibition hall and is a great place to visit in a wonderful environment. The ISMEK exhibition in the Feshane in the first week of every June is like a degree show for the graduating artists and craftsmen and women. Of course, not everything is to everyone's taste but there is always stunning work and year by year, it seems to me, the standard is rising.

The pieces I am showing you in this post are all very characteristic of the Ottoman-Turkish tradition in counted work. You will see various stitches, some of them not really used in Western Europe or the US, but perhaps familiar to Eastern Europeans (since the Ottoman tradition weaves together Central Asian, Middle Eastern and Eastern European strands). They are all on linen, of course, since linen has been woven and worn in the region for thousands of years. If you look closely, you will see that the stitchers do not always use evenweave, even those these are quite complex pieces of stitching. There are very visible and large slubs in some pieces and the threads vary a lot in size. Nevertheless, the stitching comes out looking even and counted. Quite remarkable! The threads used are characteristically silk, gold and silver. You will also see some large pieces of flattened gold wire sort of "clipped" into the fabric as extra ornamentation in star or cross shapes. This seems to be a very specifically Turkish thing - I have never seen it anywhere else, but maybe someone can enlighten me on that? There is also lots of needleweaving and fringing on borders, as well as some tatting.

Where possible, I have given the names of the stitchers. Apologies to anyone whose name tag I didn't get. I will leave you to have a look at them. Any comments or questions welcome.

This one is by Hatice Muderrisoglu. The border is in the palette of the piece - that's typical - and beautifully done:

Here's one by Zekiye Cetinkaya. It has the little gold "bits" all over it:

Here's a cute little tatted border (sorry, no name for this one). But the thread looks like rayon to me: Note the gold thread on the hemstitched turn, though.

This next one was my favorite. It was breathtaking in the "flesh", and I loved the choice of colours. But no nameplate in my photo, so a Big Sorry to the wonderful artist who stitched it!

Here's a close-up on the needlewoven border:

And here's the fringing and the layout of the corner, which I loved:

This one is by Emine Colakoglu:

And I didn't get names for these three lovelies:

I hope you find them as inspiring as I do!

.

Still alive in Istanbul

No, I didn't abandon my blog and I am very, very alright (thanks for the inquiries). I went missing because I had problems with my phone line and internet connection, had to get my residence and work permit renewed, etc, etc.

Then I moved house and had masses of problems getting a new phone line and internet connection. But I am still here and still stitching. While my blog was 'down', I made skirts and an apron for me and curtains for the new house, finished my whitework and started embroidering the apron (and I just can't stop....).

My blog is about finding a positive way to settle in Istanbul and improving mys stitching, and not about the trials and tribulations of dealing with large corporations and government departments in Turkey so I won't bore you with any whining and I am going to spare Turk Telecom the story of its failings.

Without further ado, here are the views from my new home (and yes, that's REAL greenstuff and yes, I am still in Istanbul, unbelievably....).

Picture 1: view from/through frontdoor (Real live quince tree).

Picture 2: View from balcony: various fruit and nut trees.

Picture 3: View from kitchen (walnut tree, and do cast a brief glance at those shortened IKEA curtains - later post will tell you why...).

Picture 4: View from back path.

Picture 5: Part of harvest (free to residents).

The inside is much more spacious and beautiful than my last flat too. And it's cheaper and the neighbours are great (so my Turkish is improving)!

I did nothing, nothing at all to deserve such good fortune so all I can conclude is that my prayers were answered without even really being voiced, praise be!

More on the stitching next post (and I still haven't shown you the photos of the exhibition).

Where in the world....?

I realised the other day that my blog, supposedly about my needlework and adapting to life in Istanbul, has a fair few shots of my needlework, but none of Istanbul at all. From the reader's point of view I could be anywhere! So today just to prove I am not a fake blogger, I am posting some shots from my front window. I thoughtI would put these up because they show a bit of everyday life in Istanbul.

Before I came here for the first time (on a business trip at very short notice in 1999) I can honestly say that I had no mental image at all of Istanbul. I had a vague idea that somewhere over in the east of Turkey there might be sand and camels (this false stereotype can drive Turkish people crazy by the way!) and that there were a lot of beaches and bars, much like the Spanish holiday coast, in the south, and I had seen some travel agent's posters of Cappadocia (looks like another planet), but the rest was a total blank to me. That means that the bulk of Turkish life, if you like, was a blank to me because most Turkish people are either farmers or highly urbanized, exactly the two parts that were missing from my mental picture.

So, in case you think I am travelling round Istanbul on camel back or wafting about in a bikini with sand between my toes, here's where I really live:

Seriously, that's the view from my front window! And no, that's not Rapunzel's tower. That's a minaret. And if you look carefully, you will see that at the top of the minaret there are three loudspeakers. And that means LOUD! And my flat has a fire escape with a metal door facing onto the minaret, and the door amplifies the sound. The first morning, when the call to prayer went, I positively levitated off the bed in shock! Fortunately, it was winter so it wasn't so early but in the summer it goes at about 4 am. But you know, after a day or two, I got so used to it that I still needed to set alarm clocks (plural) if I wanted to get up in the morning. But maybe that's just me. I'm quite good at sleeping. I used to live right over the tube line in London so I had some practice at sleeping through noise.

Below is the park to the left of the mosque. When we moved in, this was just a patch of scrubby land and we watched the park being built and landscaped later. The speed at which they put it in was incredible and it was so lovely to watch it develop. I can't show it all with this picture because it goes round the corner. (I would say sorry for the shade on the photo, but we like shade in the summer in Istanbul, you will understand!) It is lovely to listen to all the children and teenagers playing in the park. In the time I have been coming to Istanbul regularly or living here (and I first came in 1999), the city has been greened remarkably and has become a much nicer place to live in terms of environment.

Below is another view, from a slightly different angle. The buildings in the foreground are typical working class housing in Istanbul. The blocks tend not to be very tall and are built very close together. People love their balconies and terraces, and, yes, people stand on their balconies and chat with the neighbours who are standing on their balconies on the next building. Some of the older buildings also have an open area under the roof for drying clothes in the winter. You can see that at the back of the blue building.

The square red pitched roofs you see everywhere are the descendant of Ottoman architecture - one day soon I'll post some pictures of old Ottoman mansions, I hope -and evidence that it does indeed rain and snow in Istanbul, so no flat roofs here!

The building on the right is a new build and we suffered for two years while they drilled the foundations into rock. It was an absolute nightmare! For two summers we had to choose between keeping the double-glazed windows shut to keep out the noise and so stifling inside in the heat (not much air conditioning in Istanbul), or having the windows open and enduring the hammering noise from 8am to 10pm. I appreciate how hard Turkish people work but.....some noise abatement would be great sometimes. Ironically, almost two years later a large number of the flats stand empty. They are vastly over-priced and really small compared with older flats. Also Turkish people are proving very resistant to the whole mortgage game. Because of the ban on interest payments in their religion, they like to pay real, hard cash for their houses, (that is, they like to own them or rent them, not just temporarily borrow them from a bank) and that tends to keep the prices down. Or maybe in the case of this block, we irritated neighbours uninententionally put the evil eye on the developers with all our exasperation at the noise. Who knows?

The "tents" at the bottom are in fact the covers for the stalls on our street market. I am saving that for another blogday because this week I was too shy to go down and take shots of the stalls. (I might turn out to be a useless blogger - shyness is hardly a good qualification, is it?) But, as a little preview, let me tell you, the market is great!

Also in the photo if you look closely you can see that there are lots of minarets across the skyline. Because the call to prayer is read acording to the time of day as judged by the sun (and not by the clock), what this means in practice is that it kind of "rolls" across the city like a wave. You hear it in the distance, it gets nearer until (in our case) the fire door is vibrating, and then it recedes into the distance as it "washes" from mosque to mosque. It is like a lesson in relativity or the physical proof of the passage of time five times a day. It's really stunningly beautiful sometimes, especially at sunset when you are relaxing on the balcony with family and friends and a glass of tea or two!

Anyway, I love this area. It is a really easy place to live with lots of facilities. So that means I did manage to take my sewing machine in to be mended. And it was under the guarantee, in spite of the fact I had lost my receipt. My Turkish held up under the strain too. So optimism is restored and I am just waiting from the call from the shop to say it is ready....

As for lugging the machine about in the heat - that was no problem because the one thing about men you can rely on here is that old-fashioned thing called "chivalry". I know, I know, it's a dirty word some places. It was for me before I lived here, but I then I (very, very quickly) started to like it. And really, it's not the same as male chauvinism. How do I know? Because Turkish men you know well can even insist on carrying your handbag for you in the street, no matter how fancy it is. Just picture it (but, sorry, no photos out of sheer loyalty)!

So it's true. I am in Istanbul. And I still have some pictures of an exhibition of handcrafts and traditional arts to show you soon....

.

Sewing setback

I haven't posted for a while for a number of reasons, most of them too mundane to bore anyone with, but here's a cultural one. (How fast am I assimilating?)

There is a tradition (or superstition, depending on your point of view) in Turkey that you should not show presents to people or tell others about your blessings out of fear of the evil eye. That means that people sometimes cannot help but feel envy and may inadvertently wish ill upon you. After I published the post where mentioned buying a new sewing machine, I had a moment's pause: was I gloating? Maybe I shouldn't even be blogging at all? Is blogging 'showing off'? But no, I shook off such thoughts. Anyway, I had mentioned my machine to some friends here too, so what's the difference?

I managed to make an apron and two skirts, I was really enjoying myself, and then there was a loud "clunk" from inside the machine and the reverse stopped working. Sigh.

The machine is still under guarantee, but I cannot for the life of me find the receipt, the shop is quite a distance, and I have no car. So that means lugging the machine on the minibus or bus in the June heat. And I am not even sure that they will take it for repair without the receipt. And I have to do the whole works in Turkish. Repeated sighs.

At worst I can pay for a repair and it probably won't be expensive. I even think I could open up the machine and do it myself. But maybe I should stick one of those little blue charms on my machine!

Anyway, my stash is staring at me, willing me to get the machine mended, so I must do something.

It's not all bad news, though. At the weekend I did manage to make it to a huge exhibition of traditional Turkish arts and handcrafts and took lots of photos. It was stunning. So I'll post those soon, I hope.

Oh and someone gave my blog an award (astonishingly). Only my current state of disenchantment and demoralization is preventing me from displaying it and passing it on. But I will, I promise.

And my whitework is creeping on at snail's pace. And here's a little tiny bit of needle tatting I tried out:

And I have found someone who is willing to teach me how to tat! So that's great news.

Onward, ever onward.....

How do you mime bias binding?

Turkey is a land of textiles, so shopping for them shouldn't be very hard, but for me it is complicated by the language problem.


I mentioned that I had lashed out on a sewing machine a couple of weeks ago. So out from the bottom drawer came my stash which I had carried all the way from London. First it had languished there for a couple of years, then it languished here for a couple more, but finally I cut into the lovely blue linen - skirt coming up, I hoped.


Ah, but then, no zip, no interfacing, no button, no bias binding. So off I trotted to lovely Uskudar (shopping by the seaside always fun) on the minibus (one day I'll tell you a good story about Turkish minibuses), and plunged into the fabric shop. It was about as big as my kitchen but fully stacked with rolls of fabric along every wall from floor to ceiling. Treasure trove (or Aladdin's cave, even)! So what did I do?


I wasn't too impulsive. I did spend quite a while eyeballing the bolts (silently, I'm still not really up to broken-Turkish-small-talk with people I don't know well), but then I forgot all about zips, interfacing, buttons and binding, and bought three new fabrics for the stash! I just couldn't stop myself! But you knew that, didn't you?


But, once I had handed over the cash, I did remember to ask for a zip and the shopkeeper directed me to the small haberdasher's across the corridor in the covered market, where I had a a lovely friendly time buying buttons and zips and things. So here's (some of) the new stash'n'stuff:



Trying to get bias binding was a dead loss, though. I had even brought a small piece with me (brought from England and left over from binding an embroidery hoop) to show the shopkeeper. Before I set off to the shops I had searched dictionaries and websites and failed to find out what it was called in Turkish. You know, you get really quite good at miming in shops after a while of living somewhere where you don't quite speak the language, but I had cleverly anticipated that miming 'bias binding' would be a bit beyond me.....


Alas, even when I showed it to the nice lady, she didn't know what it was, and she asked me what it was for. So I still had to mime what you do with it! Darn! No escape from being the twitching, muttering, mad foreigner in spite of all the careful pre-excursion prep! I suspect she didn't find the mime very illuminating, and I actually groaned with frustration. I imagine her at home later, "You know, this rather odd foreign woman came into the shop this afternoon....".


Anyway, after the short and somewhat stressful stash-building foray I went for a glass of tea in the basement of the covered market at my friend Hulya's ebru atelier, where she had two students working at the time, painting tulips in a tank of water (the flowers were in the tank, not the students). And one of them, Sevilay, told me what bias binding was in Turkish (biye) and when the others asked "What's it for?" she explained in Turkish (kenar kapatma icin). Oh, Sevilay, seni seviyorum! [= I love you. Cultural note: this phrase v. important to learn in Turkish, used with great frequency and not only with romantic intent, but men (without romantic intent) usually say "we love you" to each other, not "I", so as not to cause any confusion, I understand...]


Anyway, now I know what bias binding is in Turkish and I know how to explain what it is! As they say in Turkey, 'ma'ashallah' [That's like, "Oh what wonders He performs!" or thereabouts]. What a great day. Three new fabrics, tea with the girls in the atelier, several new words, and all by the seaside. I love Istanbul!

PS. Here's the linen skirt with the interfacing going in:

PPS. Of course, I haven't actually found any bias binding yet......