Brummie Blogger

May's Cottage finally done

It seems to have taken ages to do these two borders considering I've left some bits off. All finished now though and I'm almost done on part seventeen of The Great Escape so I'll be able to start the next part of Around the World soon. That's if I can put my Kindle down, of course. I'm on a reading binge at the moment, having let my curiosity get the better of me on the current book craze that was intriguing me. Sigh. I never learn.

Still, some stitching has been done and this is the result.

As you can see it's completely bee-less. There should have been four of the vile creatures in each border but I left two out and changed the colours in the other two to make them resemble oddly coloured butterflies. Or floating flowers, whichever you prefer. I was going to leave all of them out but would have had to change the spacing of the leaves to avoid an odd gap and didn't realise that until I'd stitched most of one border. By then I just wanted to get it finished so I lobbed in the butterflies/floating flowers/whatevers  to fill in the gaps. They'll do.

I also changed the pink border flowers to white to calm it all down a bit and I'm much happier with that. In hindsight, I should just have used a different shade of pink but I'll know to do something before I start if I'm uneasy about the colours next time. Lesson learnt.

June's Cottage is kitted up and ready to go and I like the colours much more than this one. It's much fresher looking. I'm going to have fun with Around the World first though. Part two looks lovely.

May's Cottage- almost finished

I've been stitching away so intently on this that I've almost forgotten to stop and take photos. I've just taken a break to upload a photo before doing the two borders. I'm keen to get this finished so I can get the next part of The Great Escape done as I printed that off yesterday and as I guessed, it's the flowers, or rather the bush on the other side of the owl.

This is where I'm up to with the cottage at the moment.

I've done the right hand side to mirror the left side so the beehive and bee have been removed. I've also changed the colour of the birdhouse from pink to yellow as I'm not all that keen on the colour scheme for this one. The green is lovely and I like the yellow. The dark brown and white are fine and the other brown is nice enough, but I'm disappointed that there's very little variegation to it. I don't like the pink though and I could live without the two blue/greens. Mostly it's the pink that's bugging me so I'm going to change one of the flower colours in the border too.

I should get at least one border done today and maybe get a start on the other. There's still no sign of the next part of Around the World for which I'm waiting very impatiently but if I can get this finished, and the next part of the Owl before that comes out, at least I'll be able to dive straight into it.

In the meantime, must get on with my bee-less borders.

The Great Escape - part sixteen

This part consisted of some more flowers and some stems. The flowers were simple enough. They're just Eyelet stitch worked around in a square, leaving a square empty in the centre. I'll be putting beads in there once it's all finished. After doing several variations on both Eyelet stitch and Ray stitch for the first part of Around the World, this posed no problems at all.

For the flowers I used one of the off-whites that I've used for the other flowers. The green is the same one used for the stems at the bottom of the design. I'm trying to use as few colours as possible to keep it looking more like a night scene.

The stems were done in backstitch on the chart but Abi suggested several variations on that to make them stand out more. She gave instructions for a couple of types of whipped backstitch and also a thinner chain stitch. I decided to be a rebel though and got out my Jane Greenoff book to find something interesting, and ended up using stem stitch. I think it looks quite good and is another stitch that I hadn't used before.

Not much left to do now. I'm guessing it'll be the remaining flowers on the right side for the next part and the moon and stars for the final part.

Meeting Rachel Caine

I've had a lovely Sunday afternoon. I spent it in a bookshop with my friend Heidi. We were in a queue for an hour to see Rachel Caine and had a nice chat while we waited. I can't think of a nicer place to stand around waiting than being surrounded by all those lovely books. I was very good and only bought the one that I wanted signed. Mostly because I was enjoying chatting to Heidi so much. Had I been on my own, I'm sure I'd have succumbed to many more.

We were in Waterstones in Birmingham New Street and I'd like to say how well organised it was and how lovely the staff were. It's the first book signing that I've been to in years appart from the informal ones that I've worked and I was pleasantly surprised at how smoothly it all went. It helped that we were there an hour before the author, as advised by the staff, so although we had to wait for the signing to start, once it did, we were near the front of the queue.

I've just snagged this photo from Twitter, taken by one of the Waterstones staff. You can see me and Heidi about a dozen people from the front. I'm wearing a cream jacket.

I bought the new Morganville Vampires book, Black Dawn, for Rachel to sign. I have all of her other books apart from a four book series which I'll be getting soon. If they'd had that series in stock, and I did ask, I'd have bought a couple of those as well. R. Cat Conrad, Rachel's husband is travelling with her and was doing artwork in people's books if they bought three or more. He's a well known fantasy artist and I've seen his work online. It's amazing. I didn't quite have the nerve to ask if I could get some artwork on the grounds that I already had all of the books though.

As it happened, we went up to the table together, me with my one book and Heidi with her two books. Cat immediately offered to do some artwork in one of them and Heidi generously offered to let me have it in mine.

Is that not incredible?? I am awestruck. That is in the back of my book! And in the front is Rachel Caine's autograph. Wow.

They were both so lovely. While Cat was doing the drawing, Rachel was autographing, and we were getting our photos taken, we were chatting away. I asked about a new book that she'd been hinting about and she told us quite a bit about it. It sounds really exciting.

We'd both taken our cameras so we took each others photos.

It was well worth standing for so long to meet Rachel, and Cat was lovely too. I'm chuffed to bits with my artwork and it was great to have some time to chat with Heidi.