On a stitching go slow...

Badly timed one as well considering that the TAST2 challenge has started. Still, I never expected to be able to join in all of it, esp. given that Tuesday is a rather impossible day to give a lot of time to needlework and always has been, but I plan to try and do it about once a month all being well.

Haven't done enough on either of my projects to merit a photo, only a little bit on the 2nd mouse on the cross stitch and have only touched the goldwork to move it to a safer place in the living room, but I hope to get on with both this weekend. I'm now back at language classes and trying to get into a good routine of study. Last term was silly, trying to cover far too much material and not enough time to practise using it or really learn it. This term looks much more balanced and I should even get a grammar book worked through.=) I'm trying to get almost all of my school work done actually at school, so that I can relax more at home and not feel I can't stitch as I haven't done my homework yet!!!

We went to a national park and the coast last Sunday - Tuesday (photos soon to go up on the Taiwan blog), and I bought some tribal inspired stash whilst I was there. There are 2 packs of quilting fabrics, one which looks typically Eastern and the other rather tribal. The chap assured me they were Taiwanese made, although they have Japanese on the label. I wasn't sure whether or not to believe him, but I remembered that quilting crafts are BIG in Japan and so the main market for those products will be through exporting up there. Anyway, either way I liked them. The bands are used extensively in Taiwan Aboriginal tribal clothing etc and so I got some of those as samples. Don't know what I'll do with them beyond using them as examples in my later C&G diploma country studies (although Taiwan is not strictly a country....), but they make a colourful addition to the stash, no? The picture above is the shop's display of the bands, or at least the top half of it. The bottom half was covered as it was raining. Fancy that! The weather is still totally mad here with torrential rain one day and temperatures soaring the next. A dull, overcast and drizzly time was forecast for our trip, but the sun came out with a vengeance and I, who wasn't prepared at all well, got rather nasty sunburn! Thankfully, although I've never had it before, knew how to treat it by applying cold, wet cloths to get the heat out and using lavendar essential oil etc. Peppermint oil soothed the itching later and the patch is beginning to heal nicely without any blistering or peeling.=)

I added some Pages to my blog recently. Nothing really exciting on them, just a start made at introducing my stitching history and so on. The page on goals is general, not just embroidery, and there's my CV for fun!! Might put more on it later on, we'll see. I also cleaned up the sidebars to just display a Gallery of favourite pieces rather than 3 years' worth that took an age to scroll through.