Stitching a Story three and sticks

Every spring and summer I attempt seeds. It is usually a disaster, but this year, I think I might have sorted things out. That includes a beautiful tin to hold my unused seeds in. More importantly, I bought those stick things that you can write on to tell you what seeds are in what pots and when they were planted. Important why? Because I am usually flailing around finding little pots and fine enough soil and other sorts of dithering to label the seed pots. I have used the seed packets and taped them to the pots or stuck them in, or other irresponsible things. They get wet, I can't read the packaging after a few days, they fall off, or blow away and the seeds don't sprout anyways. This year, those little sticks were properly labeled, unused seeds remain dry for a second sowing, and low and behold, there are actual seedlings for a change. What a brilliant idea, those sticks.

Below, Rosie's Hat continues to be stitched. I've added some red beads to her hat and some red threads to blow in the wind. At her feet are some enhanced flowers and yellow gestural stitches.

On the back side of the first page, I managed to get the stitches to be more or less upright. The back of the French Knots have been left long to make tufts out of the knots. There is a red bead on the muffin for the gull to find.

 

Mama do you love me is coming along with more intense titivation. 

 

 

Here, Mama and daughter have had their skirts enhanced with ruffles and embroidery.

 

 

The green ruffle was a rectangle embroidered with lazy daisy flowers, sewn into a tube and turned right side out. The top edge has been caught down with small running stitches to get the curves to work. The daughter's ruffle has a couple French Knots to anchor each end.

Mama's ruffle is made the way a usual ruffle is, stitched down and then the orange chain stitch added at the end. That was a bit tricky as far as keeping the hands from banging the page up, but it is a short run of sewing and I kept it very much on the surface.

Here I am working on letters. The purple is meant to be the back ground, the piece of paper napkin the foreground. It was tricky to get the napkin paper trimmed to fit inside the purple edges. Very fussy.

It turned out the paper napkin was three plys of paper. Every thing was nicely glued down, then cut out, then as I was gluing it to the page, the coloured bits peeled off. More gluing.

Kunik means kissing on the nose in Inuktitut.

For those of you interested in our bees, the hive has been moved to a dryer sunnier spot beside the garage. Michelle is showing new to bee-keeping Nick, how to move the compartments around when there are gadzillion bees on them and flying around.

Michelle has added a decorative feature at the bottom of the hive, a turquoise base. Too bad about the concrete blocks, but this is a working hive, not a garden feature. But when I sit outside with a cup of tea or a beer, I just love watching these bees do their thing.