My storage box has arrived! And so of course it needed to be filled. It now holds the three reels of sewing thread (I keep a small amount of each on a bobbin in the little project box), a spare piece of beeswax, any gold threads that I’m not using for the watering can, small acid-free envelopes for future stash plus a fine marker to write on it, a white chalk pencil with extra leads (well, chalks) and petite seed beads in gold, silver, copper and light gold.

The chalk pencil is a new bit of kit – I’m hoping to use it for drawing designs on darker fabrics. Being a mechanical pencil it’ll stay nice and sharp without maintenance, so it should be able to draw quite accurate lines (depending on my steadiness of hand), but I’ll have to give it a few tries to see how well the chalk will remain visible – it might need touching up after a while. The petite beads are part existing stash, part new acquisition: I already had a shade called Ice which will go well with silver spangles, and a shade called Champagne which isn’t quite gold (it has a slight pinky tinge), but works well if you want a little subtle sparkle. To these I added Victorian Gold, for a more straightforward gold shade, and Autumn Flame, which I hope will work well with copper threads (unfortunately I have not been able to find copper spangles anywhere, but the beads will still look good on their own in a project with copper materials).

Having had a most pleasant and enjoyable play with my new box and goldwork materials, I finally got round to a bit of actual goldwork embroidery: I’ve added four scrolls to my watering can. Going down from the top one they are Twist, Rococco, Twist again (stop singing there!) and a single line of #8 Japanese gold, all couched. I varied the couching on the two twists, using the usual perpendicular stitches on the shorter one, and slanted stitches on the longer one, following the twist of the thread as much as possible. I think the latter looks better when it is done well, but it’s terribly difficult to get the angle right!

At one point these four scrolls were accompanied by a small extra scroll done in petite beads, but I took them out as they didn’t look right. Next step will be to decide where to put the little extras such as spangles, smooth purl flowers like the blue one that’s already there, and so on. I’m looking forward to that!