stitchery

Apparently February is National Embroidery Month. I didn't know this until I got an email from DMC telling me so, but there you go. To celebrate the month they have a stitch along going that I think I'm going to try to keep up with. The finished project looks so lovely, and a little bit of stitching every day should get me there. Of course, I have lots of thread and lots of other things I could be doing with it, but I really liked the design and it will stretch my skills.

I was a few days behind in getting my hoop set up and started, but it just took me an evening to get about halfway caught up. The big UFO looking circle in the middle was an "oops" in printing on the transfer paper, but it's no big deal to just ignore it and stitch on the correct lines. My one complaint about the pattern is that there isn't really any indication of what stitches or colors go where, so I have to wait for each day's stitch along video to be posted. That's not a big deal, and I'm sure done on purpose, but it would be nice to have an annotated pattern to work off of. 

Tonight I'm totally caught up with the posted videos and I think my poppies turned out looking quite nice. I'm also getting to use my nifty bumble bee needle minder and all the accouterments of hand stitching I've got squirreled away. There are a couple of new-to-me stitches so far and I am really looking forward to learning more and adding bit by bit to this each evening. Detailed embroidery like this is something I've never really done before, and so far - super fun.