First of all a very Happy and Blessed New Year to everyone! And I hope you had a lovely Christmas too. You may have noticed (but then again, with all the festivities going on, you may not) that Flights of Fancy was rather quiet over the festive season, and this was because my husband and I were away for most of it, visiting his parents for Christmas and my family for “Oud & Nieuw”, as the new year’s celebrations are known in the Netherlands.

Fortunately I did manage to get quite a bit of stitching in (the Floral Lace series is now almost complete), and even some stash acquisition. Some time ago I treated myself to a collection of Threadworks threads, but as I bought them from a Dutch company it was cheaper to have them sent to my mother’s address, so that I didn’t actually get to see and play with them until last week. They were worth the wait though – just look at those gorgeous colours! On the right are some perle #5/#8 combinations, then a few #5 singles, then some of their extremely strokeable overdyed Vineyard silks, and on the left some perle #8/Vineyard combinations. The silks are really soft and I have been petting them to within an inch of their lives .

While in Holland I also picked up a few more thread storage boxes; well, they are just general purpose storage boxes really, but they are very useful for those threads that I keep on rings. I really wanted one box like the three I already have, but unfortunately they were out of those, so I bought two half-size ones. At a little over 1 euro each I didn’t think they were too extravagant a purchase…

I did make a rather extravagant purchase only yesterday, but I had an excuse: my very kind parents-in-law gave me some money to spend on stitching materials (well, on anything I liked, but I think they had a strong suspicion it would turn out to be stitch-related!) and I had for some time had a little wish list of Sparklies hand-dyed fabrics, so I had a lovely browse on her website and got my list plus two other colours and a few samples. Just got an email to say they are being dyed, so I should be able to show them off quite soon!