The Crafty Writer

Posts Tagged ‘sunflowers’

Trains and Gardens

I spent another week on the train this week, not a full week but I still had the time to get loads done.  The other half had been away for a couple of days the previous weekend and grumpy cat was so tired from having us around all the time that he didn’t really hang around much wanting the attention.  All that meant to me being able to spend hours just stitching.  So the train has really grown in the week, not as much as the previous week but there’s a wheel starting to appear and lots of detail on the engine itself.  There are so many colour changes on the engine, the rest of the background stitches quite quickly until the train really slows you down.  I think I’m almost halfway through the second pair of pages and I’m really looking forward to getting onto the dragon that begins to appear at the end of these pages.

I’ve also been spending time doing some gardening, just the front garden which was a mess and in desparate need of attenion before it was completely swallowed by a bush.  With lots of help it has now been tamed and planted up with some new plants and flowers and I’m going to be putting some more in for lots of summer colour.  After all that work though my muscles were aching too much to let me get on with any stitching and I’m going to take a break from the train this week.

The plan this week is to get on with more stitching on the sunflowers, I think they’re very nearly finished now but this last part is really dragging and I’m just keen to get on with my other so enthusiasm is waning quickly.  Hopefully the time spent in the garden will give me the inspiration I need to work on my stitched flowers.

Rotations

Since starting on the detailed and time consuming Heaven and Earth Design picture I decided that I would allow myself to have two sewings in progress at a time to keep the enthusiasm going.  I got off to such a good start with Fairy Tales that I found I was spending most of my time on it, that isn’t a bad thing but I was worried that I would get fed up with it so I decided that I would try to work in rotations.  This is my first attempt at it really, I used to only have one picture on the go at a time and then it got to one large picture with a small one on standby for when I didn’t have a lot of time to settle down and stitch; now I have stepped it up to two large projects.

Each Monday I change what project I’m working on, this week has been spent on a sunflower design by Nel Whatmore which was printed in Cross Stitch Crazy magazine.  As soon as I saw this design I knew that I would have to stitch it, I really love the colours and the way it looks painted.  So far I’ve done a few petals of the sunflower and yesterday completed the centre of it, I can spend a little more time on it today and then tomorrow I’m back with Fairy Tales.

It feels a bit strange at first to swap between the projects week on week, what I’m hoping will happen is that as I near the end of each week I’ll be looking forward to working with different colours and different size stitches the following week.  Sunflowers is being stitched on 14 count aida whilst Fairy Tales is being done on 25 count evenweave, I think it’s been a little while since I’ve done any stitching on anything larger that 16 count so the stitches feel huge.  Once I’ve done a couple of months with this rotation I’ll think about how it’s getting on; if it’s working well I’ll leave it as is but if a week doesn’t feel long enough I’ll consider doing a two week rotation.