Squeezed in February

This February has been a glorious month with blue skies – even when it started with a sprinkling of snow – then later we had warm sunshine too!

Now, I may just squeak this post in to the end of the month (or maybe not by the time I finish this!).  I feel as though I’ve had my head buried in the sand of winter and that I’m just coming out of hibernation. I think ‘energised’ is the word I’m looking for.

My stitching journey this month started with the latest reveal of the Fifteen by Fifteen group (you can see the full display at https://fifteenquilts.com/).

This challenge was ‘blooming’ and for my entry I also wanted to continue my underlying theme of ‘trees’ – so I chose to base my design on a flowering tree, and picked Magnolia to that end. I wanted to suggest a sunny afternoon sitting relaxing below a magnolia tree, with a cup of tea and a good book. So my background is made from vintage table linen and incorporates old book pages. the flowers are hand-dyed and painted cotton.

  

Now, you remember that I said that I felt I was coming out of hibernation …… well, I only slowly woke up, because there isn’t a great deal of other stitching that managed to get finished!! Of course, I managed to fit in one of my little scrappy landscapes (it wouldn’t be me if I didn’t!) – so here it is.

   

You may notice that my pictures are a bit hit-and-miss in this post. The reason – my trusty old laptop died. To cut a long and fraught, traumatic and nervous story short I now have a brand new laptop and a partially repaired old one working (anything involving computer hardware sends me blubbering into a corner). Neither of these seems to have the same picture ‘functions’ that my old-old one did, so there’ll be many days of figuring-out in the foreseeable future.

In between computer headaches, I’m working on a couple of larger urban landscapes in a style that’s a bit of a departure from my normal one. I don’t quite know how to describe it – sort of simplistic, naive, deconstructed – you’ll get the gist when I show you next month. So there’s a good excuse to look in again then. (Let’s call it a cliff-hanger shall we?).

Joan