A Fabulous Friday all around! Today, I’ll show you some progress on Late Harvest, discuss some woes and triumphs, offer some tips that you might find helpful in your own embroidery pursuits, and beat myself over the head for some deliberate oversights.

For those of you just joining in here on Needle ‘n Thread, one of my latest Pleasure Projects – one of those projects I’m working through just for the fun of it – is Late Harvest, designed by Hazel Blompkamp and featured in her book Crewel Intensions, which I reviewed in depth here.

And Late Harvest IS fun! Even though I run into many self-induced snags along the way, it’s rather exhilarating to work my way out of them and to make up my mind how to attack similar situations later on.

It’s a particularly fun project, too, because there’s enough variety in it that you don’t get bored doing the same thing over and over again.

At the same time, there’s enough similarity among many of the elements that you really have the opportunity to improve on certain skills. I figure there’s always room for improvement in every path of life, including my embroidery. Anything that makes me better, I like! Even if the experience can be kind of grueling at the time!

So, here’s a recap on my latest jaunt with Late Harvest.

Happy Thursday!

Today, I want to introduce to you all a wonderful new website for those of you who love historical embroidery and reproduction samplers, show you one of their charts, and point you to a really sweet free pattern that I want to use for a particular stitching technique.

I have to show this to you!

Remember that list of Things to Do in 2016 from last week? Well, embroidery on felt is one of them.

I love embroidering on felt! I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I had so much fun with this needlebook years and years ago. It was such a “free form” project – no rules, no preconceived ideas. Just stitching whatever occurred to me.

Yes, that was certainly the beginning of my romance with stitching on felt.

Well, for Christmas, I received the most adorable little felt pincushion from a very kind reader. And I have to show it to you, so that you can see that stitching on felt can be creative, delicate, and addictive!

You know that Long List of Things to Do in 2016 that I posted the other day?

Well, I left off one little thing.

Well, actually…I left off several little things.

I left them off on purpose, because I thought they weren’t really worth mentioning. But the more I think about it, the more I realize that these little stitchy things have given me a lot of pleasure lately – more so, perhaps, than any of my larger projects.

See, my larger projects – the projects that you see most frequently on Needle ‘n Thread – require me to traipse out to my workroom, to work in isolation in a rather lonely, cold environment, under glaring lights, sometimes using magnification, never in a really comfy chair, always with a certain level of concentration, always with a camera handy, always thinking about the article that will accompany the photos, always planning next steps… you get the idea.

But I have a collection of tiny little kits that provide me with just the opposite experience. They are my secret little indulgence.

Do you have an embroidery wish list? Those things you want to do, that keep adding up in a long, never-ending list of Stitching Adventures?

I do. If I look at it as a whole, I realize that life is probably too short to fit it all in. So I like to break it down a bit.

Before January struck and the year turned over, I made a list of Embroidery (and other needlework-related) Adventures for 2016.

In the last few weeks, I’ve mapped out my Plan of Attack for 2016. Now that I’ve done that, I can share with you my official 2016 list with greater confidence that we might actually see most of it!

The funny thing is, even my yearly list is a bit much. In reality, I know I won’t complete everything on it, but I’ll at least get it started.

I figure if I aim high, then when I land at the end of the year, I’ll be further along than otherwise.

Happy Friday all around!

Today, I’m going to take you through my latest tiny stitching adventure and tell you my thought processes and how they didn’t work, but then how they did work, and hopefully convince you that it’s ok to plow ahead even when the results of your stitching are looking a bit dim.

My adventure started when I succumbed to the temptation of working the elements of Late Harvest (an embroidery project designed by Hazel Blomkamp and featured in her book Crewel Intentions) completely out of order.

It’s been a long time since I’ve posted a free surface embroidery pattern, so this morning, I thought I’d share a little heart I’ve been dabbling with.

There’s something a little Valentine’s Day-ish and a little St. Patrick’s Day-ish combined in this design – sort of hearty, sort of shamrocky, and good for all kinds of craft techniques.

Here ’tis: