Bird in the Purple Flowers

Ebay is a weird and wonderful place. For the purposes of this post it's in the weird category.

There's an embroidery kit for sale that I stitched about 10 years ago. It's called Enchanted April and was produced by now-defunct JCA under the 'Elsa Williams Heritage Collection' brand.

The subject is an egret in what appears to be a jacaranda (a common and beautiful tree where I live). It's quite a spectacular (and large) piece. I waited quite a few years before tackling it and I remember that it took a fair amount of time to stitch.

Hello, Goodbye

I was rummaging around in my workroom and came across a crewel piece from 2005. It is a project from a class taught by Carol Algie Higginbotham entitled Crewel Spray.

The class was one of many being offered by the Embroiderers' Guild of America (EGA) regional seminar that happened to be hosted by my local chapter that year. I remember the seminar as being a lot of fun!

Back to Crewel

I used to stitch a lot of crewel, mostly commercial kits. My first projects as a child were crewel and I always loved embroidering with wool.

Over the past 10 years I've moved away from crewel into techniques like thread painting, but I miss wool.

Burr-gundy Rosebuds

Trish Burr has some lovely beginner projects including this one: Burgundy Rosebuds. It's included in her book Needle Painting Embroidery: Fresh Ideas for Beginners which is my go-to book when I need a quick, relaxing embroidery project.

I purchased this design as a kit several years ago before the book was published (back in the days when I was pattern-tracing-resistant). I recently found the kit when I was organising some embroidery items and decided it was time to work on it.