…Story Time Sampler – Lady Shallot…

Between homeschooling, and spending our weekends at the farm, I’ve found a lot of my time is spent doing portable handcrafts that I can sneak in in the five minutes the kids are all working on their lessons, or for half an hour sitting in the sun as the kids help daddy in the garden. Over winter, my rainbow wave blanket has seen a fair bit of love, and I’m starting to see healthy progress on the hand quilting of my improv BOM-companion quilt. Lately, however, as the weather warms up, and my main projects grow in size and become increasingly unweildy, I’ve found myself reaching more often for a smaller project, which naturally draws me back to my 2015 Frosted Pumpkin Stitchery pattern of the month cross-stitch – the Story Time Sampler. It’s just he right size to pop in a project pouch and tuck in my handbag, or daypack, or on the school room shelves.

The first couple of months I had this pattern, I kept up somewhat (you can see where I blogged them here and here), but life has a way of interrupting the best laid plans, and it got pushed aside. Partly, this was because I found the glitter hard to work on at night-time, which was my main craft time, but also because, well…if you’ve been around here for a while, you will know that block-of-the-month projects and I have a rather fluid relationship with time.

Over the weekend, I finished my latest block. In testament to exactly how long this project has been sitting in my WIP drawer, I proudly instagrammed away, sharing how close I was to finishing “Maid Marion”, which elicited a response of “by Maid Marion, do you mean Lady Shallot?”. Um. Yes. That’s totally what I meant. Not awkward at all, really!

She of the ambigious literary origin turned out so cute! I have found with many of these blocks, what looks on the pattern like random splotches of colour, become clearly recognisable once stitched up, and this block was no different – what I thought was a funny coloured ground, in fact turned out to be a boat (which also may have been more obvious earlier on, had I been thinking of the correct story).

With Lady Shallot done, I am 7 blocks down, and have just started block 8 – Phantom of the Opera. At this stage, I haven’t added the frames, as I didn’t love the included thread against the linen. I’m thinking I will do them all in a charcoal grey, so I will do them all in one go at the end, and then finish off with the small icons at the top of the frame.

Today, I’m hoping to be rather productive to make up for a quiet day yesterday snuggling with Mr9 who was a bit under the weather. There’s spring cleaning calling my name. I finally makde it to the shops to get elastic to finish Miss7’s shorts, so a quick 10 minutes at the machine will have that crossed off the list. Playgroup this morning, and if the weather stays nice, we might call it a farm-schooling kind of day and maybe even get some grapevines planted out. Some more work on the Phantom. I’m told trains are a must do. Maybe that spring cleaning will have to wait one more day…