Archie The Wonder Dog

This is my final finish for this quarter and is, once again, something small! Back in July, when I wrote my FAL Q3 list , I included my first piece of hardanger, which looked almost finished but in fact had the nerve-racking cutting out still to be done, as well as the needle weaving and dove's eye stitches to finish off: It's only a small piece of hardanger - that's a 4" hoop! By the end of July I had a finish, just not a blog post about that finish (no change there, then!) and, although it's only small, I do love it and can honestly say there's more work in it than you'd think to look at it!! It's a surprisingly hard thing to photograph and I completely forgot to take a photo of the hardanger before I stitched it onto the strawberry, so I'm afraid these photos will have to do! I think the strawberry is about 1.5" high and the hardanger is somewhere around 1.5" across its widest point - quite small but n...

Last November, I went to the Knit and Stitch Show in Harrogate and found this lovely pattern on a stall (sorry, I have no idea what the stall was called!).  I knew I wanted to change the look and that I didn't want to make an embroidery for framing so I decided to make a cushion.  (You'll notice that the title of this post doesn't match this intention!) My lovely friend Beryl gave me a piece of 28 count evenweave and a quick introduction to stitching on it (I've only ever used Aida and canvas for counted work) and I got to work. I changed the spellings of some words to their British English versions and added touches of colour as I went.  For future reference, the threads I used were: Anchor 399 (grey), Anchor 55 (pink), DMC 211 (lilac), DMC 3846 (turquoise), DMC 703 (green) and Metz 0295 (yellow) (I don't think this brand exists, but I have a collection  of stranded cotton going back to the 1980s and some of the shades are perfect and don'...

I didn't intend to leave such a gap between blog posts but when you're spending more time asleep than awake it's hard to find time to do very much at all, let alone write a blog post.  Enough of that, let's get started, shall we?! Have I told you I joined  Bee A Brit Stingy ?  There was a space available for 2014 and I decided to take the plunge and become a full member, rather than just helping out with admin and cheering from the sidelines.  I was concerned about whether I'd manage to make the equivalent of two 12" blocks each month as my sewing time is variable and my sewing machine time is extremely limited most of the time* but I decided to give it a whirl. * To any new readers who are wondering why this is: I have M.E. and so have limited energy to spend on all aspects of my life as well as having to recover from any physical or mental activity by resting.  I find machine sewing very tiring so only attempt it on an afternoon but I often spend the wh...