inspiration and progress

Yesterday I spent much of my day designing tiny little pretty embroideries. They will be quick to do and make fantastic gifts.

The embroideries took on a life of their own and also formed themselves into something unexpected. Just like the motifs in “Portuguese Whitework: Bullion Embroidery from Guimarães” which as an after-thought formed themselves into a sampler and became one of the most popular projects in the book, these ones seem to have formed themselves into a sampler as well!

I plan to get on to stitching some of the little embroideries today to see how they work. Hopefully they’ll work very well! Each year for Christmas, I make my husband’s staff a gift each. I think that this year they’ll all be getting one of these.

Yesterday morning and on Monday I made my jacket toile for my CIAM pattern drafting course. The fit still needs some tinkering, but I’ll be happy with my design once those little problems are sorted out. I needed to do a special finish on one of the edges, so I tried that out, and was very pleased with the result.

I’ve also been slogging away on my tablecloth whenever there is a chance – waiting in the car to pick up a child, watching a movie in the evening, waiting for a large file to open on my computer, waiting for a file to spool to the printer, and in other spare minutes grabbed here and there.

There are 28 large motifs on the tablecloth. There are lots of other things too, but they’re the large countable bits. I’ve completed 25 of the motifs and am now working on the 26th one. It is lovely to be getting so close to finishing all those large motifs!