Summer Sunsets

 

In recent days the weather hasn't been brilliant for a summer month. It's been very wet and blustery and just grey, even when it's not raining. The hardest part is to know what to wear - do you take out a sunhat and sun cream in a light weight outfit, or do you pack umbrella and raincoat and wrap up against the wind. Worst of all, there's been a lot of high temperatures but rain and and an endless feeling of mugginess (I'm not sure if that's just a British thing? Where it feels hot and steamy on your skin but there isn't any sunshine to go with it?) that really messes with your wardrobe plans! And my hair.

With a little one to consider as well, we are lugging around far more than the kitchen sink! But, a few weeks ago it was nice and warm and summery, I was out on the balcony stitching and watching the great big golden orb sink behind the forest. 

Naturally I'm so far behind on my planned blog posts you are only just seeing these now. The pigs are characterful little chaps. It's a slightly larger hoop than I regularly do, to account for the scale of the pig print and, as such, they are a little bit more demanding than a smaller hoop. They didn't like being in my rucksack as a bus project and every time I lifted the folder out of the bag the fabric had gone all saggy and the edges frayed and it was crumpled and sad...so they've been upgraded to a home project where they can lounge around all day and wait for me to pick it up when I have a spare home moment rather than a bus moment. As such they aren't getting picked up that often!

That french knot section took me a LONG time to do! It's been done with a variegated thread and I'm really chuffed with it but I don't feel I've quite recovered from the number of knots that it required, all different sizes which is achieved by the number of twists around the needle (all done with 2 strands of thread). I was even more pleased to discover a hand dyed yarn by Lamington Lass Yarns in my stash cupboard which pretty much exactly matched the stranded cotton and could be couched along the top edge. Don't you just love it when that happens?

I will never tire of this view and the colours that it shows. 

When it hasn't been sunny and gloriously sunset-ted evenings, I have been finishing off my discarded initial draft of the new Fire Flower kit. Having now completed Fire Flower II, I have gone back to this sad little rejected hoop and have been injecting some love back into it. Now that I'm not so restricted by the number of threads I can use on it, I planned to fill in more sections and have a little fun. To be honest, if you purchase either of the Fire Flower kits (or any of my kits for that matter), you can also add more into them than I have instruction-ed, make it your own! 

I'll write a proper blog post about this little piece as I would with any of my completed Stitchscapes, but I thought it nicely rounded off a blog post about not very much at all.