I hope I’m not the only one who buys craft kits and then take a year (or five in this case!) to start on them. In 2012 I got one of  Rosework’s embroidery patterns called “Firebird” and finally started working on it about a month ago. (Roseworks is a local — i.e. South African — brand.) In my defence, though, I have been busy with needlepoint and did not realise when I bought said pattern that it called for over 40 colours of embroidery cotton.

Okay, and I forgot I had it for a while… (Part of the reason why I really needed to declutter my craft cupboard — I had stuff in there I’d forgotten about.)

But anyway, so about two months ago I found a local place that sells the DMC embroidery cotton for a lot cheaper than the usual wool-and-embroidery-stuff-though-it-actually-sells-sewing-machines-but-I-love-the-people-there shop I go to. And I thought huzzah! Now I can actually afford to buy the cotton!

So, long story short, and after taking an hour to find all the colours (I may have gotten distracted after spotting quilling paper), I walked away with a bag of embroidery cotton, and the realisation that I haven’t embroidered anything but a few Ruon charms in years. And that the Firebird pattern stated ‘advanced’ when I looked a bit closer.

Turns out that I seem to be all right with the basics still… Mostly thanks to this little embroidery kit I got with Molly Makes and Craftsy Unlimited videos. Let’s just say that before watching the video on French knots I was utterly unable to make them. No matter how many tutorials I read. It’s the main reason I never did any proper candlewicking patterns…

Here is the Molly Makes embroidery:

And the Firebird embroidery, which is my embroidery WIP:

And here are the Ruon charms — they form part of my stories in The Ruon Chronicles.