quiet

It's been very quiet on this blog.  Seriously, I don't know how many times I have lamented about my lack of posting.  Its too late for me to bother with the whole 'New Years' post thing.  Anyhow I have given the blog a much needed renovation- something that is clean and simple, and doesn't hurt my eyes.  Or yours for that matter. I had finally decided that I did not 'need' a patterned background- this idea was OK in 2006, when this blog was started, but not now. 
Did you have a lovely holiday break?  I went back home to New Zealand and caught up with my family and friends, and generally spent a bit (ok lots) of time lazing about.  Actually I think that I needed a decent break- moving countries, settling into a new home and re-learning your job is plenty to take in.
So in that lazy holiday time my embroidery certainly did not suffer.  Early in 2011 I had set myself the goal of Completing Georgie's Embroidery, which turned out to be a bit of a fail.  By the time my niece's birthday rolled around in late December the embroidery was still only partially complete.  Little girls do not forget things so easily and I was asked where it was.  Thankfully I could hint at the things I had added recently.  
Spending time in Napier with my parents brought on an embroidery blitz, which resulted in some fab additions:


The Cats.  Meet Putty and Pipsy, the two family cats- now in embroidery form.

The Kawaii Carrot.  GG loves to eat raw carrots all the time, so I thought that a kawaii carrot would be appropriate.  And this too.  It was nice to work with a simple and graphic forms, as opposed to the more finely shaded stuff that I normally do.  I also added the speech bubble above.

The Night Sky.  I guess that adding the Night Sky was the major piece of work here- all those teeny tiny stitches took ages.  I was kind of aiming for a 'Van-Gogh-Starry-Night' effect, which I partially achieved thanks to variegated yarn.  I'm planning on blending this more with lighter blue shades on the daytime side to achieve a brighter look.
I finally named the unicorn 'Aurora', which I thought suited.  I still need to shade the banner, but baby steps.

The Witch and The Moon.  Work on this piece has stalled as I'm now on the hunt for elusive DMC Flouro Yellow thread.  When I moved into my house it was the rainiest day possible, as in torrential rain rainy. The taxi dumped me outside my apartment block with my gear, and I then had to get my housemate to help me haul in all my stuff before it got completely soaked. When I got inside I was very quick to make sure I put the embroidery somewhere safe to dry.  However I had separated all the yarn I was using on the witch/moon into a red bag.  Which was not colourfast.  I discovered this about a week later.  Flouro yellow thread was now a bad shade of orange, glow in the dark thread was red-ish and anything blue looked distinctly purple. *sigh*  

So, overall (progress):

Since returning to Melbourne I have barely picked this piece of work up.  Perhaps I need a quiet weekend with decent light and a dash of motivation to make a little more progress.


Bye!