A stitching update

 I’m sorry for my absence, our life together has been overtaken with difficulty just now; living has taken on a new priority, and my dearest heart is quite unwell, so we are going along quietly together. In the in between times I am still stitching where I can. 

My most recent project was to create a hanging for his bedroom from some delicious African fabrics I bought years ago with him in mind. He recently asked for someting to replace a lovely old family portrait of his great grandfather as a little boy in Regency frock. Little Arthur has returned to a house he previously lived in, much to the delight of the house owner. The result was this; some giraffes, which are an old private symbol between us, African fabrics, because he grew up in Africa, and three little four patches, composed from fabrics I used in his three great grandchildren’s quilts, so they are with him in spirit. It is another little “story quilt” with fabric links which means something to us. 

Having completed that, I needed something new to work on, or perhaps something in progress to mover further on. You will remember this series from here, here and here.

I am hoping to begin the next phase with this piece of cloth, more gleanings from that first quilt, and not quite as pale as it appears here.

I have cobbled it together with Jude’s Glue Stitch, a regular web of tiny stitches and long intervals which creates a single piece of cloth from several little bits, all held down on a base cloth, here calico. It leaves a little grid of tiny stitches on the front, but they get subsumed by embroidery, and it is a much nicer cloth to stitch on than if you bonded them down with adhesive webbing, however fine.

I think the three pieces will sit rather well together when finished

I am taking  another Stitchtopia trip in a week’s time, just eight days, and my dear heart’s daughter will take care of him while I am away. We will be knitting in the Faroe Islands, and I will be meeting up with a few previous fellow travellers, so much to look forward to, but I will also be spending time in airports, so wanted something to take along to stitch. I’m hoping this will work.