I thought it might be time to give out a taste of what I have been stitching lately. I have pulled out a piece of Drawn Thread that I started in 2005 and am trying to finish it. There seems to be a lot of finishing of UFO's, WIP's or whatever we like to call them being finished this year. So this will be one of mine to finish.It should be finished very soon. Well, the stitching will be finished tonight but there will be some finishing that needs to be done, like shopping for fabric for lining. Anyway, the corners were an experiment & I am very happy with how they turned out. Watch this space for a pic of the completely finished item!

Band RR book Cover

Since I came back home I have been working on a book cover for the band RR. It has been digitized and stitched out on my sewing machine onto hand dyed calico.

I started working on this last year and I was trying to achieve a blackwork look by machine. It sort of worked but the positions of the stitches leave a little to be desired and to change that I would have to change the whole outline of the letters. That would mean basically starting from scratch and I did not want to do that.

It was done on my Artista program & I have a lot of learning to do on that one!

Stitching Sisters Band Sampler

Even though I have been away on holidays it doesn't mean I neglected my stitching. This is for a Counted Band Sampler Round Robin I have joined in with an on-line stitching group for the next 18 months. There are 9 of us in it with two months given to stitch our bands.

I have decided that each band will be of my own design and hopefully stretch me in some way.

This one is my own designs and it is the first time I have done one of the filling stitches. It also gave me a chance to practice my doves eyes that I learnt last year and realize that I need to practice my picots.

The threads are also some of my own hand dyed ones.

Christmas & New Year was spent a little further up the coast at Scott's Head. It is one of those little sleepy coastal villages that quadruples in size at this time of year.

The beach here goes for miles and at the other end there is another town which has a river

estuary.

This is the view from the other end of the beach and the beginning of the estuary. I haven't walked the full length of this beach yet, it is a long way.

This is just one of the frangipanni trees in the garden where we stayed. The colour is just beautiful and this town is the only place I have seen orange frangipannis.

This is the grevillea that was growing outside our bedroom window. The wattle birds and the blue wrens would come & sit but never would stay still long enough for me to take a photo.

However this little baby kookaburra graced us with his presence one morning. He sat on our balcony for ages and did not fear us as we took heaps of photos of him. My eldest son tried to feed him bread but of course he was not interested. He would have much prefered a worm, lizard, cicarda, cricket of a piece of ham. All the Christmas ham was gone by this stage so we had nothing else to offer him.

Well it has been some time since I added to this. I guess that is because I was busy getting all my course work finished and hung for presentation and assesment. I might add at this point that I have been getting great feedback about my work and I received a Grade 1 pass for it all. That was the highest level pass that they gave so I am pretty happy.



When that was all over it was a case of getting ready for Christmas & holidays away. I spent a wonderful week at Forster on the N.S.W North Coast which was soooooooooooo relaxing! Normal deal, long walks, swimming ( well maybe dipping the toes in as the water was freezing at this stage!) eating out, sleeping, reading and of course some stitching. The body just needed to STOP after a very busy year and it was the perfect week.



This is the breakwall at the entrance to the Lakes where we would walk nearly every day. It was very common to see the dolphins swimming here and one morning we saw some snorkelers riding the currents. It was amazing to watch them as the currents were moving so fast. I'm
glad they waited for the tide to come in!

If we continued to walk up the breakwall we would come to the bridge that goes across to Tuncurry. Sometimes we have walked across here & have seen turtles & stingrays swimming in the water. There are always fish & pelicans to be to be seen. The water in the center is the beginnings of the lakes.












This is the main beach at about 8am. We would walk along here, up over that headland right up to the next headland. There are lots of beautiful vantage points along the way to take in the views, lots of seats to just sit & take it all in. In the past at the right time of the year we have seen whales swimming off that end headland. The walk to the end headland takes a while but the view is worth it. You can see for miles in over 180 degree spans!