Finished!

Phew! Just in time! MrPloppy is going to take it in to town to the framers tomorrow, and hopefully they’ll be able to get it all stretched and framed by the end of next week. He’s in a bit of a panic because I’ve left the final decisions on the mat colour and frame up…

Backstitching for rarsberry

Rarsberry asked me what backstitching is. Cross-stitch differs from other forms of embroidery in that there’s only a few basic stitches. Most forms of embroidery use lots of different stitches, with the different textures of them forming the design. Cross-stitch, on the other hand, really only has three different stitches (there are others that are…

Making progress

(Yeah, I know, I don’t update my diary for a week, and then make three entries in one day. Such is life.) I’ve almost finished the cross-stitch part of my secret project! Just a few more stitches to go to fill in that wee gap down in the bottom left there, and then it’s just…

I have a learner!

Or should that be, I have learners? I met the instructor outside the learner’s house, as arranged, and we went in together. We met D, the learner, a Romanian woman of about my age, and then she introduced us to her husband, G and her cousin (or possibly he was her husband’s cousin? I wasn’t…

Fog

Everything’s all white outside, and there are beautiful dew-bedecked spiderwebs covering all the bushes (I don’t want to think about how many spiders that adds up to!) – I think Autumn must be here. The big news for this week is that I had my last ESOL-HT class! Well, technically it’s the second last, because…

Tangi

Early yesterday morning the phone rang. It was lytteltonwitch with some shocking news: she’d just heard that otakuu‘s husband had died. I raced to LiveJournal, and there was a post from otakuu telling her friends that her Beloved was gone. And if I needed further confirmation, the media was already reporting the death, as The…

Pretty lights and colours

On Saturday night lytteltonwitch and I went to the Chinese Lantern Festival in Victoria Square. I’d never been to the festival before (other than unexpectedly coming across the unlit lanterns during the day once), so I had no idea how popular it was. I arrived at Victoria Square just after 5pm, and already there were…

And still busy

As you can probably guess by the frequency of updates to my diary, things haven’t really quietened down yet. Work is still busy, I’ve got huge amounts of work to do study-wise, and the ESOL classes on Tuesday nights aren’t helping, because I have to go straight there from work to get there in time,…

Busy, busy, busy

I knew going to a convention in late February was going to be a bad idea. I feel like I haven’t had a chance to breathe since coming back from Wellington, let alone do things like update my diary. It’s one of our busiest times of year at work, of course (and although I don’t…

Secret project report

I haven’t posted pictures for a long time of the cross-stitch I’ve been doing for awhina‘s wedding, but I’ve been quietly working away at it: It’s looking pretty good, but my two big worries now are that I’m rapidly running out of time (the wedding’s on 7 April, and I’ve got to leave enough time…