It feels like the houses are taking forever. I think all I did today was tiny cross-stitch windows. They need to be aligned and more or less equally sized, and they’re small and fiddly. But they’re necessary, to hold down the long stitches of the house facades.

Made a start at the Stockholm embroidery at the embroidery club meeting today.

Yeah, this will take a while.

I’m using Bayeux stitch to fill all that space for the houses. I learned that stitch here at the embroidery club, and I really don’t know what I would have done here instead if I didn’t know this one. It fits so perfectly.

Getting ready to start working on the Stockholm-themed embroidery at the embroidery club tomorrow. I haven’t done much figurative embroidery, but why not try.

Just choosing something to represent Stockholm was hard. I wanted a concrete picture of Stockholm, not something symbolic (like the subway map). I wanted something personal but also general: an image that would be clearly recognizable as Stockholm by not just me (not a view of our house, for example) but at the same time I don’t want a generic postcard.

In the end I settled on using this old photo of mine of Karlberg. The combination of earth-toned buildings, water, and greenery all together feel like quintessential Stockholm to me.

The group’s suggested end date for the project is mid-May. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be done by that time. The marked area on the fabric is 30 by 45 cm. I get a lot for free from the background fabric – I won’t be embroidering much on the sky or the water – but that’s still quite a lot of fabric to cover with stitches. But I’d rather make something that I can be proud of, perhaps even hang on a wall, than focus on a deadline. If it takes me until Christmas – well, then it does.

Buying fabric for my next embroidery project.

The stitch sampler is more or less done. Our next shared project will be a free embroidery on the theme of “Stockholm”. I have some ideas but they need to ferment a little while longer before I can make decisions and buy materials.

For today I’m just embroidering nothing in particular. I have a second-hand pillowcase that I bought at a charity shop for 30 kr that I’ve been decorating with simple, meditative running stitch. It might turn into a project bag when I feel done with it.

I also did some work on the self-portrait I started some years ago. Mouths are tricky.

We filled the last, ninth square in our stitch sampler, with latticework. This could be a lot more elaborate, but I think I’ll be leaving it as is.

After the pleasure of making this, the main point of all these squares will be to remind me of all the possibilities.

Yesterday’s embroidery club session focused on three-dimensional embroidery techniques.

French knots are the simplest example of those. Sometimes they come out really well for me, and sometimes every other knot loses shape.

Bullion knots – like French knots, but elongated into tiny sausages – were even harder. They kept coming out like small, uneven worms. I think I had the wrong yarn for this – they’d be easier with a smoother, less grippy yarn.

The woven stitches worked better, and the woven wheel stitches looked really nice in fluffy wool yarn.

Embroidery club. Didn’t remember to take a photo of what we were doing, but here’s a detail from a piece of embroidered artwork that was hanging on the wall at the venue.

This is the best part of the embroidery club – seeing other people’s work up close, and being inspired by work that is so different from anything I myself have done. Of course it’s also nice to get a nudge every other week to do some stitching, and to have company while doing so.

I’ve been to a local “knitting café” a couple of times, but never got hooked. I figured out why, after some time: I don’t enjoy hanging out with people I don’t know and won’t have a chance to get to know either. At the knit café it’s a crowd of new, random people every time. Some might come back, but overall it’s mostly strangers. The embroidery club on the other hand is folks I know.

I’m finished with the blingy skirt, and it came out really nice.

Front panel:

Back panel:

Side view:

Lots of different pieces with different styles.

This is the one I did last, when I was running out of ideas. A bit of an afterthought, and yet it turned out to be Adrian’s favourite.

This piece is the only reminder of the silk fabric that inspired the colour scheme.

Eric liked the latticework designs best.

Some are inspired by archaic Nordic decorations, like old Estonian embroidery and Swedish rock carvings.

Some focus on particular stitches, such as French knots…

… and variations on chain stitch.

I’ve got my embroidery club meeting coming up on Thursday and the ladies expect to see my embroidered skirt and I still haven’t finished assembling it, because it’s the least creative and most tedious part of it all. Got to hurry up now to get it done by Thursday.