Sunday ♥♥♥

Happy Sunday All! I forgot to ask, did any of you see the Supermoon last weekend? We couldn't see it on the Monday night when it was supposed to be the absolute biggest and brightest due to cloud cover, however we did catch it on the Sunday and it was pretty spectacular then!! Apparently it will do this again in December but then not until 2020- amazing how that happens. I've popped together a few of my Sunday ♥♥ below, mostly fabric related and all very exciting!!

♥♥ I've framed some more of my stitchscapes (And just realised that I never showed you in detail the finished Little Red Roof Stitchscape- I'll pop that in another post this week) which are now taking up quite a bit of space in the sitting room! I've managed to find a lovely box frame from Wilkos for my White Cliffs Stitchscape as the shells meant it couldn't go under the usual layered glass. The mount I had to make myself as the frame didn't come with one, and it had to be quite narrow to fit the embroidery. I think I did quite well with the precision cutting and I might be heading back to Wilkos for some more of these frames to do the others!

♥♥ Yesterday I hopped on a train with The Mother and two very good friends of ours and headed off to the big city for some retail therapy. We'd been sent free entry tickets to the Stitching, Sewing & Hobbycrafts at Christmas show at the ExCel in London, which I had gone to last year as well (see here). This time around there weren't so many exhibition and display things to look at but seemed to be more stalls and lots more items that were right up my street! (I may have spent slightly more than I had anticipated but it's all good and highly necessary things.) Several of the stalls were names The Mother and I recognised from our visits to other shows at Ardingly and Olympia- we are seasoned craft show goers now!!- such as Stitch Witch, Puddleducks and Fabrics Galore, and as you can see, my stash has grown somewhat....

Although I mostly bought fat quarters (those 6 for £10 offers are a real temptation!), there were also some really lovely fancy ribbons which I just had to have, some new DMC threads (because, really, can you have too many??), sequins from the bargain bin, a tube of really gorgeous tiny green beads and some beading needles to go with them, and finally some beautiful, watery, hand dyed silk squares which you can barely feel they are so fine.

Goodness, I feel a bit out of breath just listing all of this colourful wonderness!! The others had also made rather a lot of triumphant purchases, and The Mother is spending today playing with her new items- she went for the more papercraft related items for her fancy planner; washi tapes, gel stamps, pre-cut paper shapes, little storage boxes to keep tiny things in... We all sort of flopped onto the train home and immediately starting pulling our treasures out of their bags to compare and review, feeling very inspired to immediately start creating the instant we all got home!

♥♥ My Fields of Flowers Stitchscape is coming along relatively slowly with all of these distractions coming from all over the place. I'm not entirely sure if I like it yet. The idea was to break up the hoop into different directions, to have a very obvious horizon line with a sort of washy effect so that all of the focus was on the bottom of the piece with the abundance of colour and floral texture but I don't think it is quite there yet. Perhaps I will enjoy it more once I start on the lower half.

I love this little strip of lace across the centre, it adds so much more interest than just having the fabrics and stitches on their own. I have been toying with the idea of adding more texture through ribbon flowers which will go up into the horizon, crossing over the lace and connecting the two areas more fully, but I'm not sure whether they should be stitched flowers or if I should purchase those tiny little ribbon roses you can buy and couch those down, surrounded by little leaves. Something to ponder on whilst I finish the sky I think.

I do love the colours present in these fabrics, they are completely different to ones I have used in previous stitchscapes which are starting to use a lot of green and orange! The amount of green embroidery threads I have whizzed through is quite amazing. This piece is enabling me to be slightly out of my comfort zone in the peachy, pastel area of the colour spectrum so I shall persevere until I am happy with it.