January is Moving Along and Some Stitching

 The month of January is moving along in a flash. I often wonder where the time goes when I am not paying attention.  The full moon on the 17th was beautiful, I was outside briefly to take my trash can to the curb and there she was rising above my house at 7:25 p.m.

I didn't expect to see her at all because it had been raining most of the day and more rain was expected, yet to my surprise and delight she was shining brightly.  I stood in her light to absorb her energy and I could feel her pull rising my energy from me.

On January 1st I began stitching  a new hand embroidery piece. I have a few other designs I need to transfer to fabric once I chose the fabric I want to use for each project.  Here is a look at my progress up to January 9th.

She is the first of three figures in this design, I am using an older 100% cotton fabric that I love it has a paisley design in the palest natural tone, if I am not mistaken it was 108″ fabric sold as quilt backing. I’ve use the fabric for several pieces and just love the look of the design when stitched. So far I am using DMC floss 603.  I don’t often use so much pink but for this it just felt right. 

Later in the week I continued my stitching working on the second figure of the piece and using DMC 602 floss. It’s a slightly darker shade of pink than the first figure, originally I had planned to use a blue on the 2nd figure and purple for the 3rd, but the more I looked at the colors together I liked the shades of pink rather than the multiple colors, the third figure will be stitched in DMC 601.

The piece is of The Moriae, or the Greek Fates “spinners of fate” controlling the lives of humans in pieces of thread. Clotho spun the thread, Lachesis handled it, and Atropos cut the thread at the end of one’s life.  I thought a fitting piece for this hand embroiderer.

On the 17th I spent a few hours stitching the second figure, removed the piece from the hoop to move on to the third figure, threaded my needles and put it aside for the night to give my fingers a rest.

The first two figures are not complete I still have to go back to stitch the hair, face and hands, since I will be using the same color floss for flesh I thought it would be easier to do all at once. Now I think I should have just completed each figure as I stitched. Looking at the two figures together I can’t tell the difference in the floss, so perhaps the pink, blue and purple colors I had originally planned would have been a better idea. Once the stitch and wash product is washed away and the black lines are gone the colors won’t be so identical or at least I hope so.