Saturday 7th April 2012

For some reason I can’t settle down to stitch at the moment. There are several reasons for that; the main one is the fact that most of my stitching is done in the evenings, sat in a comfy armchair. Fine for most of my designs, but not ideal for the woven picots in Frozen Flower – I really need to be sitting in my other stitching place for that, in the dining room with my hoop propped up against the table, being distracted by the garden which is beginning to get nice and colourful with all the grape hyacinths and tulips. But that really only happens at weekends when we have nothing else to do, which doesn’t seem to be quite as often as I’d like!

Another reason is that several other designs are calling loudly to be stitched right now, and although usually I am quite happy to change my Planned order, unfortunately the threads for Fruit of the Spirit are on special order, and I’m beginning to be a little unhappy with the threads I chose for Odessa, so I can start neither of the two.

So what do I do in the evenings if I don’t stitch? Well, get through some of the programmes accumulated on our video recorder (or whatever the correct term is for its modern replacement), but also sketch new ideas.

Quite often I begin and complete designs on the computer. I’ve got an ancient cross stitch program which I bought second-hand on eBay several years ago, and by making extensive use of the backstitch tool and lots of self-defined stitches I manage to chart Hardanger with it. The advantage of this "doodling on the computer" approach is that I can use whatever turns out right and delete what doesn’t, and it is also a lot quicker to copy and rotate bits of a design when you don’t have to draw them all by hand. But sometimes I have only rather vague ideas, and then I prefer to sketch them out on paper; the paper method has the advantage that I don’t have to be at the computer to do it, and also that I can add notes, which I often do. Sometimes I even understand them when I read them back!

So here’s the sketch I did a few evenings ago. It has the seeds in it of three designs, one of them probably a small freebie. Over the next week or so I’ll show you what these doodles are based on, which ideas made it, which were discarded and why, and what the eventual result is. That is always assuming that there will be a result, which at this stage is not at all certain …