February update

Well, I had only planned on taking January off from blogging after all the Christmas stuff — I never have a lot of energy at the turn of the year — but I’ve found it really hard to get writing again.

I have been making a few cards, as needed, and I’ve done some more embroidery. I’ve even managed to get organised enough to photograph my finished pieces. But actually putting words down? I have nine projects to write up and I’m going to have to simplify some of the posts to get them done at all.

In September last year TextileArtist.org opened up registration to their Stitch Club — it’s a subscription that gives access to a library of workshops, with two new workshops every month — and I joined up. I don’t normally do subscriptions but the opportunity came at just the point where I was starting to experiment with embroidery and it seemed like a good idea. And so far, I have completed six workshops and have another two in progress. There are some I won’t do — as much as I like the look of wet felting, I have neither the space nor the energy to do it — but I still watch the videos as I love seeing how other people work.

But, like the paid classes I have done over the years, I won’t share the details of the processes involved. I will share the photos of the end results though, along with links to the workshop leaders, many of whom teach outside of Stitch Club. This, of course, has the added advantage that I don’t have to feel bad about not doing long technique write-ups for them.

And I have to get at least some posts scheduled now as I have no idea how I’m going to be feeling over the next few weeks. I’ve mentioned my cancer a couple of times on the blog and how the medication I’ve been on for the past three years has been keeping it stable, well, the inevitable happened and my last scan showed some new changes. To be fair, I was told the median time the medication works for is eighteen months so it’s done pretty well. Now I’m back on steroids, and I’ll be taking advantage of modern technology and having targeted radiotherapy in a couple of weeks. I am not about to turn this into a cancer blog, but I know some of you have been following me for a long time and so I will make the occasional mention as time passes.

Anyway, back to the fun creative stuff. I have three cards in different styles coming up (when I’ve finished doing the words), there might even be some Mother’s Day cards if I manage to get myself organised in time, and then there’ll be the Stitch Club series of embroidery and embroidery-related workshops. Just as soon as I get my brain in writing mode…