My time to shine

Today we learnt the cross stitch, side stitch and raw edge fell stitch. I cannot for the life of me get comfortable while I’m hand stitching though. The desks are a good height to work on while standing up but you get tired standing up and I prefer to have the cloth on my lap so I sit down. But the chairs are the swively office ones and they make you look like a child sitting at the dinner table so I sit on the table with my feet on the chair. This works well but strains the back after a while. And when the sun goes down you need better light so I sit on the sewing machine desk with my feet on the chair and the little light above my cloth. After a while this starts to annoy me too and I go back to standing up and go through all the motions again. It’s worse at home, following the sun around the house. Some sort of ergonomic chair is definitely something for the future.

I did have one advantage over some people though. My tailor friend had shown me how to do the cross stitch before and I got plenty of practice with it when I stitched a pattern onto a red top to make a Christmas jumper for my Spanish friend Javier. I have a few in the range for next Christmas.

The less is more Snowman

The Loopy Snowman

Angry Snowman

The Hitler Snowman

The East End Snowman

Later that night I was in my friend’s house and I read through her Orla Kiely book "Pattern." You couldn’t pull me away from it. What an inspirational book, Orla is some woman. What is happening to me?