My narrowboat is coming along nicely. As you can see from the latest pic, the boat itself is complete, as are the two darkest shades of blue in the water. So, I've been able to totally finish with a couple more colours (which feels good!!).
I decided that the fish was driving me nuts and that I was just finding it too hard, so I set out to find another suitable motif that I could put there instead. However, the only thing I could find was another little fish that didn't really fit and would probably be very little easier. What I did find though, was this piece in "Helen M Stevens' Embroidered Animals" book, which breaks down the process and helps to get it in the right order etc. Slightly contradictory in a way as, when I did the 'Ornamental Pool' design from the "Gardens" books, the instructions certainly took one through stitching the fish body before the outer trimmmings. Anyway, I'll give it a try this way and hope to get to it today, at least a little.
I've been listed quite a bit recently, which has been nice. Craft Gossip's Needlecraft blog included a link to my recent intro to stumpwork and ribbon embroidery, my stumpwork bee posting (from late 2009!) made it to a needlewrok resources blog in Turkish and someone posted a link on a French language forum here for stumpwork. So, lots of new-comers have been around of late and there are still more following those links and calling in. It's a good incentive to get on and complete WIPs, then move on to other interesting new projects!!
For those who are at all interested in our travels, the Far East and so on, I've just uploaded the final photo collection from Japan to Brauns on Tour. I'm also just about to start sorting out the Korea photos, the last things from Taiwan and then our stay in Germany and the couple of UK places we've been to since getting back, namely Durham and Edinburgh. Posts will be scheduled to appear every couple of days, if all goes according to plan!! I said IF!!!
Blogger has been having very annoying problems with hard/carriage returns. Absolutely none carry through to the actual post, so I'm having to draw on my (limited) knowledge of HTML in order to get my posts to look decent. =( Either too many lines, or none at all. I also had to manually insert the link to the travel blog. Ack! Hope they get this sorted soon, or is this a ploy to get us all onto using the new editor?
