Ireland and Indonesia

If you go back to this blog post you will see the edging that I started 10 months ago.  I found the muddled piece of tatting (typical UFO!) and managed to complete the edging this week.   The pattern, Crowning Glory, is from Mark Myers site (AKA Tatman) and can be found here.

It is surrounding a piece of Irish linen which was purchased when I was on holiday there, placed on it is a piece of  Connemara marble (found only in a remote area in the Connemara Mountains of Western Ireland) in the shape of the country.  




Whilst in Indonesia I purchased small pieces of batik with the intention to tat around them. Well may be one day!  

They are very creased as they got rather squashed in the suitcase!  But here is where the pieces came from. We were taken to the back of the shop to see how the batik is made, this woman's skirt is just full of wax as she wipes her pen on it.

This fellow is putting colour on to a picture.

I did not purchase any batik pictures from this shop, although my sons did.  The pictures I bought came from the shop village near to our hotel, which I will write about at a later date.




My suitcase though contained plenty of other items in the batik style!




I have come back to say that tomorrow is St. Swithin's Day 15th July, he was once a Bishop of Winchester, a city we live quite near to.  It is a day on which people watch the weather, for tradition says that whatever the weather is like on St. Swithin's Day, it will continue so for the next forty days.

There is a weather-rhyme well known throughout the British Isles since Elizabethan times.

'St. Swithin's day if thou dost rain
For forty days it will remain
St. Swithin's day if thou be fair
For forty days 'twill rain nae mair.'

dost = does
thou = you
nae mair = no more.



So we are really hoping that tomorrow will be dry after so much rain over the past few months.