What a year to make a stitch diary!!

I’ve just managed to finish the facing page for my Anthea textile book. This is the stitch-a-long by Faby Reilly, as well as stitching the design I’m also making a wordplay for the month. I’m choosing words or phrases about the month, including special dates etc. I decided early on not to include anything overtly covid, but it’s impossible to comletely ignore it…

April’s design is gorgeous, a cluster of violets.

Easter was obviously going to be the main date for April. We haven’t got any family birthday’s in April so I decided to include Captain Tom’s. Captain Tom Moore has gone from obscurity to a national treasure in a matter of weeks. He decided in April to walk 100 laps of his garden to celebrate his 100th birthday at the end of the month. His family set up a Just Fundraising page as he was aiming to raise £1000 for NHS charities. Somehow Michael Ball heard about it and interviewed him on his radio show. It just went viral, last time I checked he had raised £32 million!!! He made his 100 laps and the Yorkshire Regiment did a socially distanced guard of honour for his last lap. On his birthday a spitfire and a hurricaine did a flypast and he was made an honorary Colonel. My OH thinks it’s a shame they didn’t skip a rank so he’d be Major Tom!

The quote at the bottom is also from Captain Tom, he said for those of you getting worried and stressed about the current situation, just remember the sun will shine again… I thought it was a lovely message.

A lot of flowers are early this year due to the warm weather, many trees were in blossom. I always think of bluebell woods as a May thing, but the bluebells on the back lane were in flower for most of April.

The Chevin cross is one thing I have missed this year, usually about a month before Easter the local churches get together and erect a huge wooden cross on the top of the Chevin, you can see it from most of Otley town centre. I like seeing it up there but it was another casualty of covid.

My favourite plant in the garden in April has to be my magnolia stellate, it was beautiful, I wanted to include it’s full name but I couldn’t quite fit it in! The goldfinches returned to our feeders too, I usually think of them as summer visitors to ur garden but I might be wrong.

I think next month I might try and sketch onto graph paper the outline of each word, just say 5 squares by 34 squares, rather than just laying the cut out bits on top, it might make things a bit easier without taking as long as rewriting it all in the square. I also made a couple of errors with the colours. My usual aim is to simply use the same colours as the main square, I have a little organza bag to keep them all in. Unfortunately this time two extras sneaked in and I didn’t realise, so blossom and viola aren’t in quite the right shades, but I think it all looks OK. I also confirmed what I wondered for a while, 32 count linen measures differently on warp to weft, this explains why I had problems with my stitchbook pages. I now need to determine which way up before I start stitching each page!

Faby has just released the May pattern and it looks so pretty, lots of pink cherry blossom.