Well, it’s been a while, hasn’t it! I’m afraid Covid hit me rather harder than I’d ever expected, and I can think of no better illustration of this than my embroidery progress since the virus struck the Figworthy household in the last week of July. In those eight-and-a-half weeks I’ve picked up a needle twice. No, wait – I did a little bit of mending as well, so make that three times. You may remember the little tree with its modified satin stitch trunk which was my project back then. Here it is with the sum total of my progress in August and September (both bits done, incidentally, at the monthly Cake & Craft meeting which we organise at our church, and to which you are very welcome should you find yourself in the Rugby area on the third Friday of the month).

And even that little progress includes a fudge because in the second orange stem stitch I left the loop on the wrong side of the needle when coming up, and I didn’t notice it until later. Definitely not the time to try anything complicated!

So I’ve had to get my stitching excitement, such as it is, from other sources. One was a book on Japanese silk embroidery which I found, completely unexpectedly, in the most wonderful second-hand bookshop in Lyme Regis. Years ago I did a taster workshop at the Ally Pally Knitting & Stitching Show (before I started teaching there myself), and it quickly became clear to me that it is not my cup of tea (green or otherwise). It is a beautiful technique, and I’ve been looking in awe and admiration at some of the work done by fellow members of the Mary Corbet Facebook group, but I have no desire whatever to have another go myself. However, that doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy reading about it and gazing at the illustrations, finding more and more details to marvel at; three pounds well spent indeed.

Somewhere in those barren two months there was also some designing done, albeit in a very embryonic way. A couple of years ago I took the most serendipitous photograph of a jewel-like dragonfly in the sensory garden in Hunstanton, a split second before it flew off. From the start it felt like an embroidery waiting to happen, but I couldn’t quite work out how to capture it in thread – my needlepainting, the obvious technique, is by no means good enough to do it justice.

But then one day, as I was sitting there not stitching and with no inclination to stitch, I happened upon a post by Lizzy Pye of Laurelin Embroidery showing an or nué beetle in progress. And I thought, why not an or nué dragonfly? It would have to be stylised, but the metal background would give that lovely shimmer to it that I’d been hoping to get. And bit by bit ideas piled up. Or nué, as the “or” part of the name suggests, is worked on a background of gold passing or Jap; but that didn’t really fit with my idea of the dragonfly. Very well then, use a silver background; argent nué, to coin a phrase, with silk for the body and something metallic and sparkly and very fine for the wings. They would form the “nué” part of the name, which translates literally as “clouded”, and refers to the picture “clouding” the gold background, achieved by means of coloured couching threads fully covering the metal foundation threads. It is related to, but not quite the same as Italian couching, where the density of coloured couching creates shading but not an image; I used that technique in the bling version of the Tree of Life.

So far this mythical dragonfly exists only on paper and in my head, but I look forward to experimenting with various weights of passing and a variety of couching threads when I feel up to embroidering again.

A rather more practical stitch-related achievement was finally getting the fabric printed for some of my kits! Yes, I now have beautifully printed outlines for both the Little Wildflower Garden and the as yet unkitted mini Hope rainbow. Now they just need to be accurately cut into squares and ironed…

One of the downsides of this whole annoying long Covid thing is that I had to ask the Knitting & Stitching Show organisers to cancel my James the Jacobean Snail workshop. As I have never taught him before, there was just too much preparation still to be done, and where normally two months would have been ample for that, at the moment it is simply not doable. But if you were one of the people looking forward to having a go at James, or if you were disappointed because you couldn’t come to the workshop as it was on the wrong continent or at the wrong time, good news – it’ll be a little while, but James will have his moment of glory and be out there for all embroidering snail enthusiasts to stitch. I’ll keep you informed!

There, that was quite enough activity for today; a nap curled up with a nice warm pussycat is called for I think. But although it may be some time before the next update, and there may not be much stitching in that, I’ll try not to let another two months pass before the next FoF.