No, it’s not the Dutch version of Walking with Dinosaurs – it’s an old Dutch saying (this reminds me terribly of the television series “To the Manor Born”, where the aged mother of one of the main characters used to preface many of her remarks with “we have a saying in old Czechoslovakia”, said in a strong Eastern European accent. But I digress). Walking with windmills, or “met molentjes lopen”, means to be a bit batty. But before you start worrying about Mabel’s sanity, let me put your mind at rest; I was merely reminded of this saying because I am trying to decide which fabric to use for Windmills. I’m hoping to start stitching the model when I’ve finished work on Three of Diamonds and Badges, and I’m really looking forward to it!

When I designed Windmills I intended to use a hand-dyed fabric, probably very light blue and white, to look like a summer sky with fluffy clouds (known in the Old Country as sheep clouds). I’d also picked a thread – Caron 154 Firecracker, a striking and rather patriotic red white & blue. Unfortunately when I got the thread it wasn’t quite what I had expected; the colours weren’t as disctinct as I’d hoped, so there was some slightly muddy purple between the red and blue. It’s a perfectly good thread and I’ll use it one day, but not for Windmills.

I put the design on the back burner for the time being, thinking a suitable thread would turn up some time. And it did. It’s a Threadworx perle called Bradley’s Balloons and you need sunglasses to work with it. It is bright, it is bold, it is brilliant, and when you first see it you wonder what on earth you could use it for. I love it, and I think it will be just perfect for Windmills; those little toy windmills you used to get on the beach were never very subtly coloured either, were they?

So now I just need to decide on the fabric. There are two candidates, both from Sparklies: a medium/light blue called Caribbean Blue, and a light blue/white called Summer Skies. Going by the names of course the latter seems the obvious choice, but I do like the richer blues in the other one. The thread seems to go well with either of them:

For the moment I’ll leave both fabrics out with the threads on top, so I see them every time I walk past the dining table (where a lot of my stitching stuff lives – which reminds me we’ve got friends coming to dinner next week so I’d better do some tidying up!) in the hope that eventually one of the combinations will show itself to be The Right One. Or I may just have to stitch it twice …