As we approach spring and summer, I’ve been playing with a few design ideas for fun, relaxing, vacation-oriented ready-to-stitch goods.

One idea that has finally surfaced (every pun intended) is rather fishy…

When I was in high school, a snorkeling to the Florida Keys was the beginning of a life-long infatuation with tropical fish. Since then, I’ve always been twitterpated with ocean life, aquariums, shells, seashores, and the like. And while I’m not a tropical-sun, beachy sort (give me a Northeast or Northwest rocky seashore any day!), I love tropical fish.

I’ve wanted to try a colorful tropical fish line on my ready-to-stitch towels for quite a while. Last month, on a grey, cold, winter day, I was doodling. Suddenly, fish started turning up. So I figured why not? It would give me a project to work on during the evening hours while camped out in my temporary home.

I gathered up a rather messy amount of threads that struck me as particularly tropical in color.

My goal is nothing near realism. Just fun, stylized tropical fish, using a variety of colors and whatever stitches happen to pop into my head.

I want to give the fish a little personality as I go along, so I’m going to try to use the eyes to do that.

It always seems that embroidery featuring living creatures doesn’t really come to life until you add the eyes. These won’t be realistic eyes by a long shot, but I’m hoping that they’ll express something, whether it’s surprise, humor, curiosity – I don’t know yet.

For easy transport, I packed up all those threads into a small tin and fixed up a needle case with a pair of scissors and some needles.

Since I’m living temporarily somewhere other than home, I don’t have access to any needlework goods unless I tote them with me from work. This works out really well, because it affords me one project without distraction.

I scoured the studio for something a little more theme-ish to tote the project in. But all I had was this ugly orange mesh bag.

The zipper bag lets me pack everything away nice and tidily at the end of a session, so there’s no mess about the place. And if I happen to go anywhere that would allow for stitching on the go, I can grab it and take it with me. Very handy!

So that’s a little side project that will perhaps materialize as ready-to-stitch goods before summer. I’ve got one other design floating in my head – not fish related at all – that will emerge shortly, too.

We’ll be in production mode on ready-to-stitch towels as soon as this Stitch Snippet stitch-along is underway and we’ve got the kits for that launched. We’ll be preparing most of the designs that we already have, and then, once I finish some samples, we’ll prepare the new design sets.

I’ll keep you posted!