Ten Years of Blogging - Year three 2007/8

Welcome to the third year of ten in our blog review series and thanks again so much for all the nice responses that have come my way so far.

I wonder if some who remember the dog portrait, but aren't sure they were following back then may have seen it in later articles.  I'm kinda proud of him, so I don't mind giving him the occasional airing on blog. =)

There were two weddings in fairly quick succession.  Above is the completed bedding bale for one couple (handover for which was a tad late, er-hum!  Blame all the class prep. I had to do at the time, grrrr!) and here also is the framed picture in it's presentation box for the other couple.  I also had the pleasure of helping one of the grooms' sisters to make a stitched gift as her pressie to her brother during August '07.

Mid autumn 2007 saw me deciding to give up class teaching as I was finding a lot of the work too stressful for me to manage, given that my health was rapidly going downhill, so I quit.  I remember buying quite a lot of stitching goodies around that time as retail therapy! Here I am with some of the original class members after a Chinese meal out together for the last class.  I can't say I remember anyone of the students having the nerve to order in Chinese, but it was a good excuse!!  I wonder how and what they are all doing these days...??

Probably the most major stitching project of this blog year was the 'Branches of Your Life' card that I made on behalf of the whole department when our teams' manager moved on to another job, late January 2008.  It took a couple of weeks of fairly concentrated stitching to get it done on time, but I cracked it - despite running out of a key thread part way through working the tree trunk, calling in at a good LNS in York on the way home from a week away to get some, finding none and finally placing my one and only telephone order to Sew and So, only to find I'd missed that day's post anyway!  Quite a stressful piece all things considered.

Here's the recipient taking his first good look at it.  I was so disappointed that he first saw it with his back to me, as I didn't get to see his very first reaction, but having said that, he was a fairly reserved sort of chap, so there was probably nothing to see. =)

I'd been ooh-ing and aah-ing over this design in the 'Anchor Beginners Guide to Freestyle Embroidery' for years, and finally decided to go ahead and stitch it.  It then sat in a box for a while until I could think of what to do with it (see Year 4!)

At this point, blogging awards were beginning to make the rounds (remember those?  Where you nominated your favourite blogs and they got to display a logo?) and I decorated my blog with them for a while.=)  Thanks again to all those kind enough to nominate me back then. xx

Spring 2008 saw me beginning to stash all manner of Derwent art pencils too and I posted about 3 different lots of them on blog!!

In March/April Sir and I went for a three week trip to Taiwan, the first visit there since we'd met there back in 1997, both doing a year studying Chinese at the same language centre.

I loved these cute purses so much that I bought a load of fabrics etc and sent them back to myself to have a go at making them myself.  Shameful to say, but I've yet to try...!

In May of this year, I started the first of my other blogs that has survived to this day: A Polyglot (in Training).  I won't say my dedication to it is admirable, (except to someone who thinks blogging a total waste of time - which viewpoint I can see a certain amount of validity in!!!), but it's still there, and I still post to it from time to time.

I finally got a Victoria Sampler design 'Child of Spring' finished up into a scatter cushion cover after two big fails at it.  I'd actually started this the previous blog year during the early summer, but it was almost a year before I was happy with the sewing up of it.

Finally, in June I took my viola prep test (a music 'exam' pre-grade one) and Theory of Music grade two, which I later found out I'd passed with something like 98%.=)  That became my very first level one qualification (on the QCF scale).  Everything else I had was level two or above.

That's it for this year.  Tune in for year 4 tomorrow.

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2015