My main holiday stitching project was a new one, the bird alphabet from the French designer, Les Brodeuses Parisiennes, so it’s officially called Le Grande Alphabet Oiseaux. I took squares of two different shades of Permin even weave linen in my suitcase, ivory and a lovely shade of palest duck egg blue. I didn’t just want ivory and it wasn’t easy to find a colour that went well with the blue of the lettering.

I tended to stitch this on the cruise when it wasn’t too breezy! If it was a bit windy I stitched the sheep as it wouldn’t have been the end of the world if the pattern flew overboard, with this being a set, it would have been a disaster!!

I shared the letter A and a start on B whilst I was on the cruise…

I have now finished B and I cracked on and stitched the letter C too…

…although I’ve just realised I’ve not done the white back-stitches around the sparrows eyes!

I haven’t quite decided how I’m going to make these into a book, with a minimum of thirteen pages it could be quite thick. I’m wondering about stitching it a bit like I was meant to do in the Strawberry Sampler book with a hem stitch edge as that would keep bulk to a minimum. I might work one of the wider letters soon like M or W so I can gauge the minimum size a page needs to be. I don’t want to leave myself with 26 pages to hem stitch at the end. I’m also mulling about how to bind the pages together, ideally I’d sort out all of this before I started a book, but I tend to jump in feet first with the stitching! I have stitched the letters on much bigger squares than I needed to just so I could leave my options open.

I’m really enjoying stitching these, I think they’re lovely designs, I like the fact that they’re all recognisable birds and they’re pretty and delicate without being twee. Hopefully it won’t be too long before the letter D is stitched.