Banishing The Blues

Spring has finally sprung. The birds are singing, the grass is growing, the forget-me-nots are blooming and the leaves on my rowan tree are just about to open. 

Dora spends most of her day in the garden alternating between snoozing in the sun and doing her doggy aerobics on the lawn. I can´t say I feel fit enough yet to join her. I´m still supposed to be resting though a life of ease doesn´t really appeal to me any more so I take that as a sign that I´m beginning to recover from my recent ordeal in the clinic. Besides, sowing seeds and planting summer flowers don´t actually come under the heading of manual labour, more a labour of love and when I feel I´ve done enough there´s always my recliner to – literally – fall back on. Even then I´m not completely idle as I´ve always got some handwork project or other to keep me occupied. A while back I mentioned I intended to stitch an oriental cat. Well, that´s been finished for quite some time now. I just haven´t got around to framing it yet.

As you can see, I used variegated thread for the background and I´m quite pleased with the result though I couldn´t help wondering if it would have looked better if I´d used the same thread for both the motif and the background so I stitched another slightly smaller version in a different shade of blue....

….and I´m still not sure which I prefer. After that I went on to stitch some smaller oriental pictures just to get all that blue out of my thread box and my system before going on to something more challenging.

 

The next one was definitely challenging but, as you can see, I still haven´t managed to banish either the blues or the oriental theme.

Since then I´ve gone on to a more topical – and colourful – theme of apple blossoms. I think I´ve finally got over the blues in more senses than one!