I think I’ve got too many embroidery projects on at the moment, like four! Rather than concentrating on finishing my long running ones like my garden book and the Owl and Hare Hollow quilt blocks, I keep being distracted by the new ones, namely the embroidered tote bag and the strawberry sampler book, hence I’ve finished another page for the strawberry sampler book.

This is a kit produced by the Cross-Stitch Guild, I bought it at the Knitting and Stitching show last year with the idea of stitching it on holiday, which I did. I stitched the cover…

This still needs finishing with a double folded edge and some hem-stitch.

I also stitched the first pair of pages, these will be folded in half to make a double sided page…

I’ve now finished another page set, this one is called Strawberry Cottage, for obvious reasons! I did make a couple of mistakes on this one, the main one being that the cottage should be pinkier. One thing I have found a little confusing with the instructions is that each double page spread has it’s own set of charts over two A4 pages, which is great, but the colour symbols vary from one page to another, which I don’t find quite so great.

I automatically thought white for the picket fence, and the symbol had I think been used for white previously, so I continued with a white cottage. When I then added the shadows in a slightly darker shade of pink, it looked totally wrong. So of course, me being me, thought there must have been a printing error, unpicked the darker pink and restitched the shadows in the pale pink, which in my defence looks more like the photos in the instructions! The cottage (and the picket fence) should have been in the pale pink, then the darker pink shadows would have looked fine!! It still looks pretty!

I’m already almost halfway through the next set of pages which concentrate on darning stitch, which is basically running stitch made into patterns. After that it’s the more complicated pages with hardanger, they may take a little longer.

Half of me thinks after this next page I should put this project on one side to get the stitched garden book finished, the other half says crack on and finish this one!