Last week we had the opportunity to stay at the seaside flat of friends of ours in Norfolk and despite some changeable weather – including the tail end of storm Francis – we had a very relaxing and enjoyable time. Flat countryside, windmills and the North Sea, what more could a Dutch girl wish for .

I even managed to pick up a few stitch-related goodies! The local charity shop provided me with a book about blackwork for a mere 50p, and at a nearby art & craft centre I found a very pretty ceramic magnet and a little jewellery dish made by Wilton Road Ceramics. Sue, the lady who is Wilton Road Ceramics, was working on some story stones while we were there, which was interesting to watch. The magnet is now serving as a needle minder on my Lowery stand; the little tray could be used for odds and ends while stitching, I suppose, but has instead been designated my tea bag dish – an almost equally important task.

While on holiday I did some work on the Ottoman Tulip. I had hoped to bring a different travel project, one which I’d done some sketches for, but unfortunately I ran out of time to finish drawing the design properly, let alone choose the threads, iron the fabric, transfer the design and hoop up. The Ottoman Tulip sits undisturbed in one of my document boxes most of the time, but there is no denying it comes into its own when the need for a travel project arises: it’s small, uses only a few colours, and is made up of areas to be filled in using mainly split stitch and stem stitch, so I hardly need to look at my notes.

In the course of stitching this design (which I started in October last year) there have been a few dilemmas about colour. I’m using Carrie’s Creation overdyed stranded cotton, which with hindsight was not ideal as I’ve since found out they have been discontinued. Still, the slight variegation in them does work very well in capturing the not-quite-solid shades of the original medieval tile, and unless I decide to turn this design into a chart pack it doesn’t matter that my stitched model can’t be replicated exactly.

The original tile uses only two blues, but I realised a bit too late that the darker of my blues was going to make the whole piece look very dark indeed if I used it for the two outer areas as well as for the main tulip. I decided to bring in a third blue, which does not go with the other two quite as well as I’d hoped, but at least will contrast better with the surrounding black lines. Which brings me to the other change.

For the black lines I’d picked Raven, which lives up to its name being a very deep black. But the black in the original tile is not actually a pure black – it is slightly washed out. I looked through my box of Carrie’s Creation to see if there was anything else that might work. There were two: Double Shot and Soot. Double Shot, as the name suggests, is a very very dark coffee colour; practically black, but a warm black. Soot is a purer grey but looking at it on the bobbin I felt it might be too light.

In the end I decided I’d try them both, working each of the two thin black leaves on either side of the flower in a different shade. For some reason I’d brought only Double Shot with me to Norfolk, so I started with that. And I liked it so much that I won’t bother with Soot! (It’s difficult to get it to show up in the photograph, but it is a rich, dark colour that is not quite black.)

And that’s where I leave the Ottoman Tulip until I next need a travel project – which under the current circumstances may well be a while… Meanwhile I have plenty of other projects to occupy myself with; not just the existing bunch (which is quite large enough) but a few new ones as well. Watch out for Hope, and a Russian inspired design which has yet to find a name.