TAST and Embroidery Journal Updates

Good morning ladies.  In all my excitement about my new found fame, I forgot to tell you about my entrepreneurial mum.  We opened our Folksy shop about 6 months ago and I sold a couple of things, but over the past 4 days, mum has sold 6 scarves!!  She really needs to get her knitting needles out and stock up!  I never usually do this on my blog, but it's time for a little self-promotion, so if you fancy checking out her brilliance, the link is here.

OK, so on to the stitching!

I'm joining in with Sharon B's TAST challenge.  Week 1 was the fly stitch.  It's a stitch I've recently been doing with crewel wool for my secret project, so wasn't too unfamiliar.  I think I had visions of me producing gorgeous, unique pieces of work with this challenge.  Nah, just some random stitches!

I had a go at single flies, chains of flies, flies with a lazy daisy or french knot at the bottom, flies with long stems and short stems, flies with 2 or three stems.

Next I tried some leaves.  I'm quite chuffed with the one on the right.  I'm stitching on linen by the way, with 2 strands of embroidery floss.

Then I thought I'd try a little scene.  I only did the grass.  I might add to this with future TAST stitches.  Or maybe not!

Next up I did some stitching for the The Floss Box's Embroidery Journal challenge.  Again, I had visions of gorgeous pieces of work, all exquisitely stitched.  I think I expect too much of myself.   I had stitching block with this as Emily said we should try to stitch without a pattern and I couldn't think of the perfect thing to stitch.  In the end I realised that didn't matter and I just had to stitch something.

I have a vision of a circular pattern, going through the colours of a rainbow.  So far I hate what I've done, but I'm going to finish it anyway.  It's supposed to be a learning process, not a work of art and I think I'm being too hard on myself.

Here I've used several shades of red to do a line in fly stitch, a line of chain stitch, herringbone stitch and chevron stitch.  The dirty marks are my fade away pen which I used to draw out the central circle and divide the hoop into 7.  I've tacked along the lines as the fade away pen tends to fade after about 5 minutes - unless I want it to of course! 

I'll show you more progress on this as and when it's made.