Coral, Kandinsky and Eagles

My insides are jumping around with excitement right now, I've just discovered The Crochet Coral Reef Project. Oh my lord, if you are interested in freeform crochet then go take a look, make sure you look at the galleries. I've been investigating freeform crochet for a few months now, just reading, looking at pics and absorbing, revving myself up to have a play.

I've got 6 skeins of hand dyed yarn that I bought in an online sale recently that are a bit coarse and I've been trying to think of something to use it for, and this idea is just perfect. The colours of this yarn are very 'nature' and would look darn spiffy as brain coral and tube worms. I've spent hours wandering through the Crochet Coral Reef site, jotting down ideas and suggestions - the people there are very generous with their explanations of how to create certain effects when you look at the taxonomy gallery photos. It's basically called the hyperbolic effect - pretty much just regular and intense stitch increasing which produces convoluted effects around the edge. Ooooo, I love it!!!

On a different note, I thought I'd show you the progress on my Kandinsky cross stitch...


Compared to the last photo, taken in October 2006. It's a slow process as I only cross stitch for a couple of hours a week when our group gets together, and the main focus of our group I might add is to dissect the problems of the world and the neighbourhood, and to drink champagne, so actually doing cross stitch is a poor second... or third... :-)

Wassily Kandinsky painted this in 1925 and it's called "Yellow-Red-Blue" (no marks for originality there!). I used a cross stitch conversion program to turn the image into a stitch pattern. It's quite interesting to see how the pattern has interpreted certain parts of the painting, particularly the thin straight lines - the cross stitch has hints of lines rather than solid ones. I'm not sure yet if I'm going to do any back stitch. I'm thinking that I probably will, just here and there.

And changing the subject yet again, I forgot to mention that Steve and I scored free tickets to the football a few weeks ago. We thoroughly enjoyed watching our beloved West Coast Eagles flog the pants off the hapless Melbourne Demons.


This is the Eagles mascot, who was wandering around outside the ground putting people in headlocks or hugging pretty girls and posing for the camera. He has attitude, you can see by look in his Eagle eye :-) That bit of blond hair in front of him is the fleeting image of a young lady who has just escaped his taloned clutches...


This was very very cool.... at one end of the stadium that contained over 40,000 excited people waiting in anticipation for the game to begin, a man released a REAL eagle - it was freaking huge! It gracefully and slowly flew from one end of the oval to the other, flew through the goalposts, then parked itself on top of the grandstand. In the meantime then handler walked into the middle of the oval where he placed something yummy on top of a giant football, then as I watched him I saw him tap the football with a stick, at which point the eagle lazily turned around and looked at him, then took off, flying back through the goalposts and landed on the giant football to eat his reward. Then the handler put the eagle (did I mention he was huge, he totally dwarfed his handler) onto his arm and walked the perimeter of the ground. It was awesome! I was amazed that the eagle didn't freak out at all the noise of the crowd.