slowly, slowly

Trying to cope with the heat has been hard. Last week the temperature reached 40ºC, after slowly going up the previous weeks. It is likely to stay there for several days more. Things are moving very slowly around here.

My embroidery too is advancing at this slow pace. When not working or cooling out in the river I may even manage a few stitches - only to stop soon after to scratch the many mosquito bites; and if I can then add a few more I'll have to get up after a short interval to get ice cubes for my swollen feet...

But I have made a little progress, though. I just hope I'll manage to keep embroidering, even if at this very slow pace, a few stitches per week...

sneak peek

I've been busy. And after nearly two months of silence there's some catching up to do with my writing, which will probably not come that easily.

I'll try to work on that. But in the meantime I can't restrain my wish to share a view of my sampler so far. At the moment I'm trying to correct some uneven lines. When these are done I'll post 'proper' pictures.

to cut a long story short (or, revised colour palette # 52)

Of course that number 52 above is just a random figure that came to my mind... But the truth is that during the last few weeks of not very good health I tried many different purples, oranges and greys in different combinations, and all of them had the same effect: a sorry sight that looked dull, sad and sallow. They looked elegant and cool when laid over the cloth, but once I tried out stitching it was a different story. The scrolls on the centre of my sampler were actually embroidered 3 times (!), and only by the third I found I had achieved what I had  foreseen with my mind's eye: a joyful match of purples and oranges offset by the neutral grey.

'Electric', 'neon-like', 'synthetic', 'artificial', 'man-made'... In my personal vocabulary all of these words have connotations that are not exactly positive, and all of these adjective apply to the colours I finally settled on. Yes, I only use chemically died floss, but never before had I used such bright shades! I'm curious to see what the effect will be once I introduce the purples on the sampler...

Choosing colours is still a very intuitive affair for me. But I wish it were otherwise so that I wouldn't waste so much time. But maybe in the future I should try out using the chosen colours on a small piece of the chosen fabric first. I wonder if this would work as a short-cut...

new year, new home, new projects...

Sharon B., of Pin Tangle, resumed TAST (Take a Stitch Tuesday), announcing the first stitch for 2013 a couple of days ago. I tried joining at the beginning of 2012, but work and the resulting etcs. prevented me from following it to the end of the year. Her initiative of organizing the challenge and producing a comprehensive online stitch dictionary are both incredibly generous - it's obvious that a lot of time and effort were put into this.

Participating in TAST is exciting and challenging, and I hope that my new life will allow me to carry on with it now. There are so many well known stitches one wishes to try out but which for some reason always remain as mere illustrations in books. And even if my return to the challenge is not regular as I may skip some variations of the better known stitches, I still think this is a wonderful opportunity to enlarge one's stitching vocabulary, and to improve technique and design skills.

I hope then to do the stitches for 2013 that I consider important and useful, and at the same time work backwards to the beginning of 2012 so that I can catch up with many nice stitches I missed last year. Hopefully I'll finish my half done sampler from last year too.

As usual I spent a long time choosing the colour palette for fabric and threads. And this is the result:

If things go according to plan and I manage to keep up with the challenge, maybe the process of choosing colours will get quicker along the year. So, to stitching in 2013!