Some time ago I showed you a lovely little goldwork design from Samplers & Antique Needlework Quarterly, and told you I was looking for an affordable copy. The publishers didn’t get back to me about letting me work from available pictures if I paid them the price of the magazine, so I kept scouring eBay and so on. Then I found a kind lady in Canada who was selling a copy of the magazine, and who, after some correspondence, was willing to take out the pages in question and send them as a letter. Yay! She sent it the very same day, even though it was a Saturday, and even gave me a partial refund on the postage when it turned out to be cheaper than she’d expected.

Those pages were in the post but hadn’t yet reached the UK when I got an email from Kathy in America, who reads these outpourings of mine and found that she’d picked up a copy of SANQ issue 38 in a pile of second-hand magazines. She wasn’t interested in ever stitching the goldwork, she wrote, so would I like her to send me the pages? What a very kind offer! I told her that, if all went well, I should have the design in a few days, but asked her if I could get back to her should anything go wrong. It didn’t, and the pages arrived some days later, but that week two phrases were often in my mind: “Stitchers are wonderful people!” and “Patience is a virtue” … if only I’d been willing to look around a bit longer the lady from Canada would still have had a complete magazine to sell.

By the way, having seen the cover pictures of the design only, I hadn’t realised how tiny it is. I suppose I should have realised that as it is a pin cushion it wasn’t likely to be huge, but even so I think I’ll enlarge it a bit before stitching it. To give you an impression, it’s the part circled in red on what is a normal-sized magazine page.

I’ve finished the floral cross! And I’m quite happy with the result on the whole – it’s my first “proper” silk shading project, as the only thing I’d done before was a 1-hour RSN workshop quite a few years ago, where we did a toadstool in long-and-short stitch (to which even then I made some changes; why is it that I can’t seem to stitch anything the way it was designed?). One of the petals on the blue flower is a bit wonky in spite of working a split stitch outline first, but my husband, bless him, says nature is wonky too and it adds to the artisan look of the thing. I do like the placing of the little yellow stitches in between the petals rather than down the middle of the petals as I’d first planned; more like a rather large forget-me-not this way.

Remember the strawberry motif I mentioned earlier this week? Although I still want to stitch it Large, I’ve decided to have a go at it on a smaller scale first. I’m afraid it’s jumped the queue, but the flowers are still there, they will get worked as well! I picked on the strawberry design as a quickie because this weekend for various reasons I can’t work on Orpheus, and I do want something to stitch. So here it is, transferred with one of my new pens on to the Normandie fabric, with a selection of silks – Gumnut stranded silk (yellow and light green) and Gumnut silk/wool (dark green), Dinky Dyes stranded silk (whitish) and Gloriana Silk Floss (pink/red).