Ten Years of Blogging - Year #5, 2009/10

Welcome to Year 5.=)

The first two months of this blog year were devoted to getting things finished off and cleared out prior to packing most of our stuff into a storage room and heading off to Taiwan for a year.  Here's the band sampler that I'd been working on ad hoc for most of the previoius year finally finished up and displayed against the back of a co-ordinating jacket!!

We flew out late August and started a year of Chinese language classes.  Not a new language for us, as many readers may know, but it was good to learn so much more at a higher level and also to 'get back into' using it so often.  I'd got a bit lazy and lapsed increasingly into English with Chinese friends, so it was helpful to get me re-motivated.

A month or so before departure, I created a travel blog, originally called 'Made in Taiwan', but re-named 'Brauns on Tour' when the Taiwan part was no longer relevant.  This is still going, although we travel so little these days =( that it doesn't get much attention anymore.  The first post was our trip to London to get the visas sorted and I lost most of those photos as my camera disk corrupted, waaah!

Here are a few shots of Taiwan:

Here's a hardanger piece that I started before we left the UK and worked on in the temporary accommodation we had, finally finishing it in our 'own' apartment.  It was a belated tenth anniversary gift for an old friend in Taiwan.  This was a very frustrating piece to photograph as the thread is pale lilac, pale pink and white variegated.  The colours just would not show up!

I'd taken a couple of the DMC stumpwork kits with me and worked the bee one.  This turned out to a very popular post getting featured on some Turkish site or other and attracted a LOT of traffic.

I also stitched this hardanger needlecase, but I don't think I finished it up at that time.  I can't remember...

And a couple more shots of our time in Taiwan.  It was about the time of the first of these photos that I realised that I found it hard to stitch without a specific goal in mind, i.e. a gift or course etc.  Deadlines provide quite a motivation to work, unless you're a self-starter (which I'm not really....)

In May 2010, I started a general topics, goals and so on blog called Fluffy Little Idiot, which is still going and to which I've posted quite a few times this year as I've been using it to do a photo documentary of my possessions downscale.

I also turned the blog I'd set up a while before to trial layouts on into a place to post about any paper-based art I did: Art Excursion.  I hope to get more into that one by taking some on-line drawing and watercolour classes next year.=)

This cute cross stitch is the last piece I completed this blog year and I made it up into a scatter cushion cover for a Taiwanese friend who'd tried hard to help up with various things.

This blogging year finished with us still in East Asia, having a couple of new counted thread projects in progress and Sew in Love being given a craft blog award by Rachel.

Japan, Korea, Germany and home coming up in Year 6....

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2015