Flowers are finally done!

Hurrah! The floral part is finally done. I did make a start on the mayfly, but it was a lot harder than it looked and, after having pulled it back out twice, I decided to move on to the fish next and come back to the fly later on!! All in all, it seems to be coming on quite well, although I still feel that much of it isn't worked well and I can quite see how inexperienced I am at getting the line of the stitches right. I do a lot of comparing angles to those in the original in order to get them something like satisfactory, but I fear I couldn't do it cold. It'd be a long time before I'd have enough skill to come up with something like this myself. Anyway, I'm not really planning to at the mo, so it doesn't matter. I don't mind working others' designs most of the time. Actually, it's a great deal less stressful and I can always adapt things more to my liking if need be. The stumpwork piece is going to be hard - especially getting all the shading in the leaves right.

Below is the current state of things on the narrowboat cross stitch. I've put the whole working frame in this time so that you can see it more in context, i.e. how much more there is to go. At this speed, it really will be a long time before this is complete. In fact, I seem to stitch at speed of snail these days!!

Next update will probably be next Sunday afternoon as has become a pattern lately. I don't get much done each week really, so it seems like once a week is about right just now.