Well my stitch-a-garden project has had to take a back seat over the last three weeks, what with trying to finish the cot quilt before Hugo was born, trying to sell the house and the worry since the little one was born, I haven’t managed to do any more stitching towards my garden fabric book.

I have managed to do a little stitching though which was started for a fabric book on bees, but I’m now having second thoughts…

I’ve a few little cross-stitches of bees and some crazy quilting with bees on so I had this idea to use them all in a fabric book about bees. I spotted this pattern ages ago on one of the destash sites and thought it was rather pretty. It’s a design by Country Cottage Crafts and it’s been my handbag project for the last couple of months. With my new job I get an hour for lunch, so that’s 20 minutes eating and 40 minutes stitching! My original plan was to stitch it in two haves for facing pages in my bee book…

I’m using some lovely dyed linen with DMC threads, the pattern uses different threads but does give DMC equivalents for all but the variegated ones so I’ve chosen ones I think will work.

I stitched to the approximate half way mark, adapting it slightly to level it off at the bottom of the words…and then decided it was going to be too long for a page, top to bottom there it was 6.5 inches and a border would be needed. The bottom half would be shorter too. So I’m currently stitching it in one piece, I’ll then decide what to do, thoughts at the moment include making it into a concertina book so that can be a double page spread, though that would mean folding it, or I might abandon the fabric book plan and use a nicely bound book to stick work in, or I could make it a bigger book, possibly using it as a cover…or I could just get it framed as a pretty picture, but I have run out of wall space!

It’s still looking decidedly crumpled despite a good press, I think it’s going to need a bit of Best Press when it’s finally finished!

This stitch-a-long is organised by Avis, we post our (supposed) progress on our chosen project every three weeks. Please follow the links to see what everyone else has been stitching.

Avis, Claire, Gun, Constanze, Christina, Kathy, Margaret, Cindy, Heidi, Jackie, Sunny, Megan, Deborah, Sharon, Daisy, AJ, Cathie, Linda, Helen, Connie