In my search for inspiration threads for canvaswork I came across a job lot of Rainbow Gallery Silk Lamé on eBay. Will they be used in the RSN Canvaswork module? Perhaps. Certainly not all of them. But they are very, very pretty, and they came to less than half price. I succumbed.

These threads are for future projects, however, so we will put them aside for now and move on to the exciting topic of Travel Projects! I need a travel project for when we go and visit my mother-in-law. I don’t actually need a new travel project because there are at least four small existing ones, ranging from itty bitty (the Quatrefoil I started in order to try out the Quaker Tapestry transfer method and a padded rose about which I will write more in a future FoF) to a little bit larger but still fitting a 5″ hoop (the Ottoman Tulip and the kaleidoscope design I got from Oh Sew Bootiful). But you know how it is…

Some time ago I found one of those small Anchor embroidery books in a charity shop – there’s a whole series of them, introductory guides about 6″ not-quite-square. This one was about crewelwork, and besides stitch descriptions it also has photographs of projects worked using these stitches (although as quite a few of them are worked in stranded cotton or perle they aren’t strictly speaking crewelwork), as well as transfers for most of these designs in the back of the book.

One design that caught my eye was a parrot on a branch. True, because of the way the big circle around his eye had been stitched he looked rather grumpy, and the colours (purples and blues and pinks on a blue background) were not what I would have chosen, but in spite of all that he had that indefinable quality of Potential. This parrot could go places!

And so he will – to Devon, when we visit my mother-in-law . I wanted him to be a relatively small and simple project, so I left out quite a bit of the foliage when I transferred him onto a spare piece of Essex linen I had lying around. As for threads, I’m doing quite a lot of things in crewel wool at the moment so he is not going to be a proper crewel parrot; instead, I’m going to use some of the DMC floche I got from America several years ago. Because it’s so difficult to find here I’ve never felt able to use it in any of my own designs, as it would be difficult for customers from the UK and Europe to get the threads. But Percy Parrot here is just for my own enjoyment, so I can use whatever I like. I’ve put my whole (admittedly not extensive) collection of floche in the travel box so I can decide what colours to use as I stitch, and I haven’t got a stitch plan – he is going to be very free freestyle.

By the way, that little blue bird shape in the project box is a hummingbird needle threader – Mary Corbet wrote about it on Needle ‘n Thread and I found it was available in the UK as well for only a couple of pounds; it looks like a good one for threading the smaller needles, which isn’t always easy with regular needle threaders. The trick in using it appear to be that after you’ve pushed the little hook through the needle’s eye and hooked the thread you move the needle along the threader to slip it off rather than pulling the threader through. I haven’t used it yet, but I’ll let you know how I get on with it!