Stitchy Saturday

I had a really crafty day today, in addition to doing a few routine Saturday jobs around the house, raking up the leaves in the garden, going out for a run and (unfortunately) having to go to the supermarket as I had run out of some essentials! But a nice easy Saturday, all in all.

I am pleased with the progress I have made today on my Moira Blackburn Sampler! As you can see, I have completed the grass and added the middle tree and a bird to the right of the tree. The graduated effect of the grass was achieved by blending several colours of green together (mid-green + olive green and olive green + light green) - also called "tweading".

The one thing that really amazed me was that when I originally stitched the flowers, I thought "they are never going to show up" because they did not seem to have a shape to them, but having added the green in the background, it is really surprising how well they came out! Also, isn't it lovely the way the leaves on the trees really do look as if they are being buffeted and blown on the top of that windy hillside. How exciting, I am going to start working on the border next, which is the really interesting part!

The other craft I did today was to make a card for my brother who will be graduating with a Masters in a couple of weeks. See like brother, like sister! We both have a Masters in a Computer Science subject, again totally spooky because we didn't know that we had both enrolled on similar courses until after we had started!

As you can tell from the card, I have made it quite simple, with some fairly plain backing paper in the peachy colour which I carefully tore just for a special effect, then added some board slogans which I thought would be appropriate. You know what men are like, they don't want a fuss really - but I think it is sufficient to show him that I am very proud of his achievements. He now has a fantastic job managing enterprise-level software implementations in a top University in US, so he has done incredibly well for himself.