Autumn Zebra

I made this last year, it was going to be part of a Halloween costume of this character in a book I was reading, but I never did the rest of the costume. The shape of the robe is from a 14th century (I think) item of clothing. This is the fabric, and essentially the pattern. It is cut on the fold, just one piece of fabric. The fabric is linen, and was white with the green embroidery, but I dyed it. The headhole and neckline is done like so: the shape sewn below is sewn onto the outside along the lines marked on it, then cut inside the lines and folded to the inside and sewn down. The hem of the "sleeves" is done by sewing a strip of fabric on the right-side, then folding to the inside and sewing it down. I sewed (by hand) a shape of a kind of lacy wool fabric over the shoulders, for decoration, because wool is awesome, and to make the shoulders water resistant to a light shower (the water drops would sit on the surface). The character was a forest dweller of a fantasy past, s

So, not much to say here other than, "here's a crane fly!" I first found out what they were by emailing Landcare Research after not being able to find it on their website , describing it as looking like an enormous mosquito. Not knowing much about insects at the time, I didn't realise that a mosquito was a fly, and therefore this thing with a similar body shape would (probably) also be a fly, and that therefore I could, for example, look up giant flies on google. It's probably simply a "house cranefly" or similar. As you can see, it has a very nice wing pattern. From the tip of it's "nose" to the end of the wings is 3cm, and the legs as it sits there spread 8cm, but apparently you can get bigger ones. Anyway, I thought it was good of the Landcare Research people to reply to people's pointless emails about giant bugs in their bedroom - good on them!

I wanted to make a case for my knitting needles so that they had somewhere tidy and sensible to go, and it was going to hold crochet stuff as well (although I never crochet, but you know, you need the stuff anyway...) but I decided to make a smaller case to hold the crochet needles by themselves. It is made of linen, and has a beetle embroidered on it, and ties up with a finger braid cord I made. Pictures below: The cord is made of fairly fine thread so takes a while to "braid" - it uses 5 loops of thread to braid it, so 10 strands. It's my first proper actual use of one of these braids (which were made in the medieval and tudor times for tying and lacing all sorts of things) other than using one to wrap a present for Mum's birthday. There are various problems with how it is sewn so I will make the knitting one more carefully, and maybe embroider TWO beetles on it. Maybe I'll even have better photos of those beetles.