Too hot to turn the iron on

It's summer, there's no A/C, and it really is that awful.  Suppers are cold cuts, cold salads, and ice cream.  Thursday it was too hot to drink beer.  Such needless suffering!  And I used to live just down the road from Willis Carrier's place!

I got a couple of snowflakes into a new hexagon thingie before it became too hot to turn the iron on.

Think Snow

Still 1/2" hexagons; it's a sample for a possible larger effort but I don't know if I have enough blue/white/silver fabrics and I haven't talked myself into justifying paying for shipping new ones. 

Anyway.  Once forward progress was stopped, I dug into the Box of Parts and found some projects waiting to have bottle caps applied with shisha stitch.  It's been...let's call it "more than two years"...since the last time I attemped to apply bottle caps with shisha stitch, and I couldn't figure out how to keep going after the foundation stitches, so I hit up Ye Olde Interwebs and found a very nice tutorial here at Needle 'n Thread, along with some other stitches and videos. 

After a day or so of practice, she released an e-Book all about shisha, including some different foundations for irregular objects.  It's like the Universe is telling me I should finish these projects that I started...I'm still not admitting to anything older than "more than two years ago".

Here is a practice sample from last week (left) next to a sample from before (right). I don't even know what that red stitch *is*.  I like that looks open and net-like, but I have no idea how to replicate it.  I don't even know if that was the stitch I was originally taught in 2004, or my own mutation.

What was interesting about the old way is instead of the bottle cap resting on top of the fabric, I seem to have embedded it so the top is flush with the surface.  Not a great side view, but there is a very noticeable difference when I put them next to each other.

Weird.  Everything is weird.  And sweaty.