Preparing to stitch

 I have begun my conversation with the piece of linen I am making for my friend who died.

One of our best ever conversations was sitting with our backs against the stone wall of the cottage, in the sunshine, blethering this way and that. So I am trying to reflect that conversation and I am really not sure  I'll ever be able to do it justice.

At the moment I am very much in the testing and trialling stage. It might take a while to figure out how to do this I think.

But I have begun.

The circular nature of women friends feels strong at the moment. Here at the cottage I have this set of embroidery threads tied onto their card with symbols for whichever pattern they were intended for. These are one of my best friends' mother's threads, and she gave them to me after her mum died - about 20 years ago, and I have used the intermittently. I was very happy that I could pick them up and maybe use some of them for this wee project.

I printed off some photos of the wall and checked if there were threads that might match. I found four and thought that was a good start.

I then set about trying to recreate the wall for stitching.  Because the fabric is so narrow I am not sure how well this will work. But off I go!

I transferred fairly accurate shapes of the stones and the pointing on the wall to my book; then onto a strip of tracing paper.

And then checked to see what it might look like on the linen.

Barry walked in and knew exactly what it was as the moment he saw it. I remain a tad hesitant.

I then used a removable marker to draw onto a test bit of fabric. And that's as far as I got.

The proof will be in the pudding once I start stitching I think.

There is no way I can fill all of the stones in with stitches unless I want this to take forever, so I will have to see if I can somehow 'sketch' them in, or slightly fill them, or indicatively fill them. We shall see!

In the meantime, before we had Sunday's beautiful blue sky, we had some seriously wicked weather. Sometimes even that weather is beautiful...