I’ve finished stitching the Lizzie*Kate ‘Winter’ button-up piece. Anyone familiar with the design will see that it’s been thoroughly de-Christmassed in that I’ve omitted the Christmas stocking and the star on the tree as well as not put the red beads on the tree, so it’s much more neutral now. DH is going to try and find some way of displaying it in a temporary mount on the wall, which will be nice.
I also did this pastel picture as a copy from a photograph. I couldn’t get to sleep one night and found I was thinking about art and getting on with some, so I got up and made a start on this one. We’re going to put a little mount around that too and pop it on the wall.
Haven’t made a lot of progress on the stumpwork, as you can see here. I think I’m preferring very easy things at the moment, like cross stitch, but that may have something to do with being so dratted tired and a bit sick of using my weary brain for school and just taking care of ordinary things which, as anyone whose lived abroad will know, can be a strain when you have to do it in another language! Anyway, I did some of it yesterday and hope to get a bit more done by and by.
I’ve been reading quite a bit again and finished ‘The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless’ by Eliza Haywood yesterday. It was the first 18th century novel I’d read for a long time after quite a number of Victorian sensation novels, so it seemed a bit slow at times, but it had its thrills. If what one reads there is anything to go by, adultery and all manner of clandestine encounters were very common amongst the middle and upper classes in those days! Seems the lower classes led the way in morality!! Of course, today, there's not much conception of morals at all and what's socially acceptable, or just what one can get away with, is often mistaken for what’s actually right......
L*K progress
My Lizzie*Kate cross stitch is coming on nicely, I've almost finished it! The walls in our new place are that painful white colour that's so start and cold that it looks grey, so I'm trying to get a few nice things done - stitching and artwork - to put on the walls to break up the monotony and make the place look more like a home and less like, well, I can't think what! A Taiwanese friend came to visit yesterday and as she walked in, she exclaimed, 'Oh, how pretty it is!' Well, it isn't (there's nothing completed yet), it's just clean, that's all!
Not done enough on the stumpwork to merit a photo yet. The last shot showed just over half of one leaf done and now there's just over two and half leaves done! Hope to have something to post on that one next week.
I don't have the internet at home now and we're not planning to get it installed (need to conserve funds, esp with the pound being so low against the Taiwan dollar), so please excuse my not having visited your blogs and commented etc. I just can't most of the time. I bring my laptop in to school to update stuff on Mondays and can use the free computer lab other days, but there I don't have access to my bookmarks, of course, so not so easy! Anyway, I'm grateful for folk still visiting me here.=)
Not managed to get a viola to play as yet, but hope to organise that very soon. Been reading a fair bit though (although I agree with Jane Bennet's comment in the latest 'Pride & Prejudice' adaptation, 'I wish I read more, but there always seems to be so many other things to do.'), and have read 'Uncle Silas', re-read 'Northanger Abbey' and am now on with 'The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless'.