I’ve been back from my travels for a week now and having brought the sunshine with me it’s been so hot I’ve just been chasing the shade round the garden, sitting stitching, trying to finish one of my holiday projects.

Before I went travelling with my daughter I decided I wanted to do some sort of travel journal in stitch, try and do a little stitching to record the places we went to. I found a length of over dyed linen in my stash which was long and narrow and even better it was overlocked down each side. I’ve no idea where it came from, it’s a softer linen, more like a dress weight. It wasn’t cut quite straight so I pulled a thread out to mark the two long edges and also tacked cotton along what would be the page edges. This proved very useful as however crumpled the piece was, I could always see where the pages would be. My plan was for a concertina book, so it could be folded out to show the whole trip.

I packed a little bag with some threads, little oddments of lace, tape and scraps of fabric so I could break up the pages if I needed to.

From the start I was a bit behind! I decided to embroider the major place names and of course that first day we had Otley, London and Ghent so by the end of the first stay in Ghent I was already behind. In my defence I was also trying to keep up with a written journal with little paintings in! I’d probably done my usual of over-committing with craft projects!!

I embroidered the star to represent Eurostar, the train between UK and Europe. In Ghent and Bruge there was lots of wisteria growing up the houses and other buildings, in fact it became one of the quotes from the holiday, “Ooh look, wisteria!” Of course Bruges (and Belgium in general} is also known for it’s lace, I had a scrap of lace in my bag so I cut the leaf motif off it.

In Maastrict we stayed on a boat, in Cologne we ate traditional sausages in a brewery. Whilst we were in Trier we went to an organ recital in the catherdral one evening. Luxembourg struck me as a very leafy city, helped by the huge gorge it’s built around.

On page two I settled down to about three places per page. In Strasbourg we saw storks on the top of trees in the park, I used blue lines of different stitches to represent rivers, canals, lakes etc so Colmar is famous for it’s canals and Freiburg for it’s fresh water rills down the streets.

We then travelled to Switzerland to Lauterbrunnen where the meadows were full of flowers. Lindau has a lighthouse on the harbour and in Munich we saw several swans in the palace gardens.

Salzburg has links to the Sound of Music film, in Vienna we saw the beautiful white Lipizzaner horses. We also had a day trip to Bratislava which is on the river Danube.

From Vienna we travelled to Lake Bled in Slovenia, we stayed opposite the island on the lake. Venice is represented by arches, there are lots in St Marks Square. In Florence we sampled the wine windows 🙂

We then travelled to Bergamo which is linked to the Bergamot orange. I’ve just realised I’ve put a T on the end which will need unpicking! Tirano is the start of the Bernina Express railway line which winds it’s way over the alps to Chur, doing loops along the way.

In Chur we stayed in a converted prison (more spacious than the boat!!) In Zermatt we took the Gornagrat train up the mountains to see the Matterhorn. Chamonix is famous for Mont Blanc, though from the town itsself the mountain is not so distinctive a shape. Annecy has both canals and a lake.

Onto the last part of our big adventure; in Paris we saw the Eiffel tower and took the train out to Giverny where Monet’s garden is.

We caught the Eurostar back to London, under the channel, before heading to home where our OH’s were waiting.

I just need to stitch a title page before making it into a book.