{"id":9158,"date":"2015-08-18T09:06:55","date_gmt":"2015-08-18T08:06:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/?p=9158"},"modified":"2016-05-30T20:28:03","modified_gmt":"2016-05-30T19:28:03","slug":"banafsiga-violets","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/2015\/08\/18\/banafsiga-violets\/","title":{"rendered":"Banafsiga – Violets"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"First<\/a>

First Petals Wired<\/p><\/div>\n

In her book, Mary Chubb describes the sort of frustrating experience that many language learners will recognise, in which a word completely useless for present practical purposes somehow sticks in the mind, while the immediately useful and necessary words just don’t. In her case, she says that while the Arabic word for “bread” required constant effort to remember, for some reason the word for “violet”, transliterated in her book as “banafsiga”, in her words “perched, fragrantly and effortlessly in my brain from the start<\/i>“.<\/p>\n

\"First<\/a>

First Leaves Wired<\/p><\/div>\n

Naturally, I’m going to have to do some violets to represent the experience, and I’ve decided to do them in stumpwork. I’ve done a little raised embroidery – I suppose those fellows Loading The Felucca<\/a> count, and there’s always the Kiwi<\/a> – but wired stumpwork is new. I won’t claim to be approaching it full of trepidation, because no-one would believe me, but I certainly have no idea which bits I will find easy and which I will find hard.<\/p>\n

\"First<\/a>

First Filled Petal<\/p><\/div>\n

Actually, as it turned out, the first difficulty lay in working out what a violet should look like. I wanted the simple, old-fashioned violets that Mary, brought up in the early twentieth century, might have known, and my image sources online kept on introducing African Violets, which apparently aren’t the same thing at all.<\/p>\n

In the end, following a suggestion from a Twitter friend, I went rummaging on the RHS<\/a> website, and found a complete rundown on viola odorata<\/i>, which told me it has five petals, heart-shaped leaves, and is “mat-forming”, which I take to mean it spreads out rather than up. I don’t know how many flowers or leaves my bunch will have in it, so I’m expecting to do more than I need and pick the best.<\/p>\n

\"Edge<\/a>

Edge Covered<\/p><\/div>\n

I’m using ordinary stranded cotton on this occasion (“Gosh<\/i>“, I hear you cry, “What happened to all the eccentric yarns you use?<\/i>“, to which I reply, “There’s paper-covered wire in there – what more do you want?<\/i>“), and in this first flower, I’m going to use two strands for the embroidery. If I think it looks a bit chunky, I can always move on to single strand for subsequent flowers.<\/p>\n

Thus far, I’m rather enjoying it. I may yet move on from these violets to the wired needlelace rose I saw in a Needlecraft<\/i> magazine twenty-five years ago, and never got around to…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In her book, Mary Chubb describes the sort of frustrating experience that many language learners will recognise, in which a word completely useless for present practical purposes somehow sticks in the mind, while the immediately useful and necessary words just don’t. In her case, she says that while the Arabic word for “bread” required constant… Continue Reading Banafsiga – Violets<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[155,35,152],"class_list":["post-9158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-dreams-of-amarna","tag-dreams-of-amarna","tag-stumpwork","tag-violets","radius"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9158"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":9900,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9158\/revisions\/9900"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.blog.virtuosewadventures.co.uk\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}