The dogma prompt: Black fabric. Fabric paint in the colour you used last week (which for me was orange). Make circles. Make straight stitches across the circles in black, and straight stitches between the circles in a colour matching the circles.

The only black fabric I found in my stash was a thin, slinky polyester thing. No stability to it whatsoever, and fraying so badly around the edges that I was afraid it would disintegrate in my hands.

I had no orange fabric paint, but I found a red (that was very dried out) and a gold (that was still liquid) so go for gold.

Those long, straight stitches that the prompt asked for, combined with the floppy fabric, produced the least durable piece of embroidery I’ve ever made. Don’t touch any of the stitches, or they will deform.

I keep saying it because I keep feeling it: I really like this kind of playful, no-commitment, low-stakes embroidery. Do something, try something new, and it doesn’t matter if it comes to nothing. Except it will probably never come to actual nothing: I’m getting so many ideas from each of these. I don’t like the look of the golden stitches between the circles (if this was an actual project, I’d rip them out) but the rest of it? Yes please. (Imagining a black blouse or top with some golden circles artfully fake-randomly sprinkled out, black stitching across the circles.)

Nysse is surprisingly good at not getting into my yarns and threads. I can knit and embroider right in front of him, and he doesn’t react. Large swathes of soft fabric, though, are tempting. But we reached an understanding: he moved away from my embroidery project when I served up a better, softer cat bed.

I was going to work on my Stockholm embroidery every day until it is done, and I really have, but I took a cheat day today. I found an active dogma embroidery group on Facebook and jumped right in.

Dogma embroidery is rule-bound, and at the same time the ultimate expression of free embroidery. Or maybe very free-ing. There is no goal to work towards. The thing you embroider isn’t aiming to become anything else. You’re not following anyone’s design, not even your own (if you’re actually following the principles and just doing).

Use fabric in your favourite colour. Use thread in the same colour, but in different qualities and values. Use only blanket stitch, in horizontal lines.

I didn’t have much orange fabric to choose from at home, and not much variety in the way of thread, either. Two kinds of orange DMC embroidery floss, a variegated red-orange-yellow perle cotton, and one wool thread that I remembered as looking orange against other backgrounds but that became more of a muddy red-brown against this bright orange cotton. But it was a pleasant exercise.

I have a plan now. One “Helen standard length” of embroidery floss per session. One session per evening (unless I’m away) but I can do two per day on weekends.

No more and no less. I want a predictable rhythm, and I don’t want to overdo it one day and then not want to pick up the work the next day. A HSL of DMC embroidery floss yields about 3 square centimetres of embroidered surface. I have about 90 cm² of trees left, which will take me a month at this pace. Then I’ll have a few weeks to fill in the glimpses of street and car and railroad, and the dark reflections of the trees in the water. Those will both be less dense and far less monotonous than the trees and should hopefully go faster. (Original image here.)

For the first time I am thinking about efficiency while embroidering. What can I do to make the stitch from back to front in the blind, without having to turn over the fabric and watch what I’m doing. How can I reduce strain on the left wrist, which has the less fun and more tiring task of holding the work in place.

It must be coming up to a year now that I’ve been busy with the Stockholm embroidery. Time to get it done. We have a weekend embroidery workshop planned for the end of March, and my goal now is to finish it before then so that I can finally do something else.

It’s not close to done by any measure, but reaching that white basted line is some kind of a landmark. When I also reach the vertical line to the right, I will have done two thirds of the trees. Finished by summer?

Finished my embroidered ATC, put it in the pile for ATCs for a blind swap, and came home with a different one.

I didn’t intend for it to come out quite as dark as it did – I thought the red would stand out more.

Next Thursday will be the last of this season’s embroidery club sessions. We agreed to swap Artist Trading Cards, so I’m making one – my first ever. I’ve still got a bunch of black, white and red design ideas I haven’t realized, so this will be something on that theme.

And a circle. I like circles.

I should have included a matchbox for scale. It measures just 6 x 9.5 cm. A lot smaller than the A5 sketchbook above.

Slow progress on the Stockholm embroidery.

It’s big and bulky enough now to be slightly difficult to transport. Folding it up doesn’t work so well any more, because of the stiff nature of the embroidered sections. I’ve taken to folding it in three lengthways, leaving the embroidered part flat, and then rolling it up.

The last two embroidery exercises for the “black, white and a colour” course.

First: “Make a design with five squares/rectangles (four-cornered shapes), four circles, and three triangles.” I struggled but in the end made something that I rather liked. The deadline for that exercise was during a very busy week for me, so I fell back on appliqué as a quick way to make shapes.

Apparently it wasn’t just me – appliqué seems to have been the instinctive choice for this exercise for all of us in the group. Hence the follow-up exercise for all of us: realize the same design but without using appliqué at all, only stitches.

This weekend wasn’t less busy. I sat with this embroidery during the Thursday embroidery club session, which I’ve normally set aside for the Stockholm embroidery, and I still ended up working until almost midnight yesterday.

I couched the black quadrilaterals with super-thick wool yarn. I wanted them to be proper black, and I also felt like doing something slightly crazy, and once the idea had struck me, I also just wanted to see what the outcome would look and feel like. I guess “interesting” is a word for it. I’m not in love with them, but I also don’t hate them, and they are definitely attention-grabbing.