Last Friday, I left home on an unexpected whirlwind trip to the Deep South.

I live in Kansas, where Dorothy put it best: There’s no place like home. Unfortunately, I couldn’t just click my heels and arrive. It was a 15 hour drive to and fro, each direction taken in a day.

Not-so-surprisingly, since I was the driver, I didn’t accomplish a bit of stitching while on the road. I’ve not perfected the “stitch anywhere” approach to embroidery – I can’t quite do it behind the wheel. We have to draw the line somewhere, after all, don’t we?

Thanks for all your well-wishes last week. Now that I’m home, I’m chomping at the bit to get some major things accomplished!

There’s something about summertime – picnics, Fourth of July, family barbecues, parties – that just hollers for gingham embroidery!

I love picnic decor in the summer, whether it’s inside or out, so I’m having some fun playing with “chicken scratch” – some free designs and a tutorial for an upcoming article that I’ll share with you when it’s published.

Several of you asked for close-ups on this little flower stitched in floche that we looked at on Monday, when chatting about color choices in embroidery.

This is as close-up a picture as I have. It’s just a little sample, whipped up to demonstrate floche and what it can be used for in surface embroidery.

The flower petals are worked in split stitch, outlined first in dark pink and filled with split stitch in light pink. The center is worked in satin stitch, and the little blue spikes and the stem and leaves are all worked in stem stitch.

That’s the nice thing about floche – it fills well with simple stitches!

Other Stitching on my List

Last night, I put some stitches into Late Harvest, indulging in stitching for pure relaxation. Sometimes, it’s just necessary! I’ll show you progress on that project down the road.

I’m embroidering a monogram in floche right now. If I don’t mess it up, I’ll show it to you. Heck, even if I do mess it up, I’ll show it to you!

Today, I have to set up a Big Project (I’ll sneak some peaks to you along the way), work up some more samples of shisha embroidery using a different thread and other things besides mirrors, figure out a plan of attack for the six-mile-long To-Do List that mysteriously developed over the past seven days, and catch up on the website and on email.

It’s so good to be home! I sure missed my Needle ‘n Thread chums! I think the rest of the summer should progress with little interruption.

Knock on wood…