Last month I received a very interesting birthday present from a friend in Kenya: a set of six beautiful leather coasters painted with African animals.

They look really good dotted around our coffee table and side tables, but what caught my attention, slightly unexpectedly, was the strip of leather that held them together (blue arrow above). Stretched out, it looks remarkable like bark. And, well…

I bounced the idea of using it for my Canvaswork project off the RSN tutor at my class last Saturday (FoF about that still to be written) and she liked it! The leather will need a bit of trimming, but sewn down using a beige thread it should resemble the tree trunk in the picture quite nicely.

Another bit of birthday inspiration came from a friend’s 70th. Obviously the occasion called for a hand-made card – but what to stitch? Well, she is a keen gardener, so something floral would be good. And I wanted to get the 70 in there somehow. Rummaging through my stash drawers I came across a beautiful hand-dyed green fabric which I got from Paintbox Threads at the Knitting & Stitching show some years ago, and a floral quilting cotton. How about some appliqué? With decorative stitching to make the numbers stand out. Two shades of Caron Watercolours suggested themselves, so I took a little time to see which one seemed more suitable, the green matching the background, or the pastel variegated one echoing the floral colours of the appliqué fabric.

There was some preparation to do anyway, so no rush to decide on a colour. First I drew a nice plump 70 on the paper side of a bit of Bondaweb. This correctly mirrored 70 is my second attempt; I’d forgotten to draw the numbers back to front first time round, but fortunately noticed before actually ironing it onto the back of the floral fabric. Then it was a matter of cutting them out and positioning them on the fabric (I chose an off-set layout), peeling off the paper backing and ironing them in place. You can attach the cut pieces with little stab stitches, but as I was going to work decorative stitches over the edges anyway I felt I could take this little shortcut.

Mr Mabel having been consulted as well, we decided that colourful is good! The green thread was returned to the thread box, and I set about stitching with the floral thread. One of my favourite stitches for this sort of project is raised chain stitch, but for this project it would be a little too chunky, and too difficult to manipulate around the angles on the 7, so I went with plain chain stitch.

Then it was just a matter of mounting it into a card with some wadding behind it, and voilà!

The de-stashing came about because I was looking for a project to take on holiday to the Netherlands. As we will be seeing family and friends as well as participating in a rally with our 1933 Austin Seven, there won’t be that much opportunity for stitching, and I wanted any stitching that did get done to be relaxing rather than challenging. It would also help if I didn’t have to take notes or think about writing instructions for the designs. Which meant that ideally, I’d take something that wasn’t my own design. Now I do have a fair few kits lying around waiting to be stitched, but complicated goldwork with lots of pearls or beetle wings (courtesy of Alison Cole) or intricate silk shading (by Bluebird Embroidery) didn’t quite fit the bill.

But I did dig out some other kits recently, when I was trying to create more space in the cupboard where I keep Mabel’s stock of kits. I must have bought them well over a decade ago, and they come from The Victoria Sampler’s Beyond Cross Stitch range. Those are all smallish designs using cross stitch plus something else, in the case of these two kits ribbonwork and Hardanger. The fabric that came with the kits wasn’t quite large enough to fit comfortably into a hoop, so I cut two new pieces to take. Add my faithful squissors and we’re good to go!

Like so many stitchers I always take far too many projects because of FORO – Fear Of Running Out. So two small kits didn’t seem quite enough. What about Heather Lewis’ Elizabethan Beauty? It contains a goldwork stitch I’ve not done before, Elizabethan plaited braid stitch worked in gold passing, which I would definitely not attempt on holiday, but it also has some not-too-intricate shading which should be doable. So the passing and spangles get left behind, the mounted fabric (silk dupion with the design drawn on and already attached to a calico backing – this is a very good kit!) and cotton threads come with us to the Netherlands. I’ll let you know when we’re back whether any of it actually got stitched…