Thursday 30 October 2008

something new

One of the other nice things about mum visiting is that she brought over 3 of my partially completed embroidery projects. (And no, we won't be discussing how many partial embroidery projects I have.) These 3 were my favourites. One is just a plain piece of counted cross stitch, a picture of Henry the 8th and his 6 wives. Remarkable only because it is the very first project I ever purchased entirely on my own.

There's a bellpull spot sampler that is so complicated I need supervision for parts of it. (I've never done any fancy hemstitching before, nor worked with hardware for finishing.) It has the first few lines of one of my favourites poems:

"What is this life, if, full of care,
we have no time to stand and stare?"

I like it because taking time to look around is really important to me. Plus the sampler is gorgeous. :D

The third is an alphabet sampler with a verse backstitched around the edge. The gist of it is "Read me poems, it makes me happy". I worked about half of this in a week a few Christmases ago and then just put it away. It's silk on cream-coloured linen, and I just thought it was a bad thing to have in a dorm and then in a student shared house. But now that I have my own home and my only roommate is my (mostly) responsible and careful spouse, I decided that it was time to finally finish it. So, this morning before I went to work, I mounted it in my stretcher frame, found all the silks, remembered how the pattern went, and started working! It's even quicker than I'd remembered, though that may have something to do with the 6 years of intervening needlework experience... I'd like to get a good chunk of it done this weekend, and hopefully I could finish it in time for Christmas!

In other news, I got two parcels in the post this morning. I've been doing a bit more swapping on Ravelry, and received 2 skeins of Regia sock yarn in a lovely mottled red/orange, complete with DPNs to knit them with. I also got 2 balls of ivory Kidsilk Haze. Amusingly, these are exactly the same colour as the 2 I found for half price at John Lewis the other day. So, now I have enough ivory KHS to make a really good-sized shawl. Now, to figure out which pattern I want to knit...