Stitching-wise, it’s been a bitty week – and none of it what I should have been stitching! Still, I’ve made progress on Join The Band, got some useful finishing done, and I’ve been trying out a couple of ideas which I’m sure will be useful as well some day.

The finishing involved all those little shisha tiles I stitched to find the version that I want to use for a second shisha kit. There they were, in a pile on the dining room table (which doubles as my place-to-put-projects-in-progress – as well as folders full of sketches, boxes of threads, a magnifier light, transfer pens, and my recently acquired lightbox), waiting for me to decide what to do with them. I could just have kept them as a record of all the variations, but I have photographs of them all and it seemed a bit of a waste, so an evening of production line cutting, padding and sticking turned them into 10 cards.

With Join The Band I’m finishing all the guilloche bands before getting to the cutting. At first I intended to complete each band before moving on to the next, but then – as with the cards – I got a bit of a production line going, finishing all the stem stitch first (done), then adding the satin stitch (two more left to do), and finally the lacing and French knots (only the middle one completed as yet). I decided to take a picture for my records because at the moment the project shows all these stages in progress.

And the ideas I’ve been trying out? More about those next time!