A couple of days before Christmas, I went to the framers to collect my stumpwork medieval mirror. I could barely remember what I chose as a frame although I recall I didn’t want any sort of mount on the assumption that the embroidery itself would form a border to the mirror which would rest in the very centre of the stitching.
The embroidered mirror frame continues to grow as A Thousand Glass Flowers wends its way across a reading population. 
This last couple of weeks, I’ve embroidered a couple of figs and an owl. Each segment was embroidered on a calico slip in a much smaller hoop, then cut out and attached to the main embroidery with little stab stitches and stuffed to give it dimension. The beads for eyes and seeds are added last.
Its grown quite a bit. I find I can’t wait to shut the computer and set up my lamp, my special specs and start the next section. When I am tired of creating new elements, I return to the leaves in the separate hoop and stitch those. 
I have 3 oak-styled leaves to do now and then two smaller light green leaves.
I don’t know about other writers but sometimes I just need to move into some other area entirely… something creative but far from the word and the rules of wordsmithing. I attend an embroidery group on Fridays and I’ve been watching all the talented ladies put together a beautiful mirror frame designed by Jane Nicholas and surrounded with stumpwork insects and flowers. 
The results are little short of jaw-dropping and I really badly need to stitch one for myself. It’ll take me a year, I think… interspersed with the odd embroidered blanket…
I seem to have been writing and diving into nothing but wordage for months now. But lately I’ve started to notice that a stitch is creeping into my mind. Not the sort of stitch that causes pain, but the threading of a needle with soft, lustred thread and then pulling it through crisp silk fabric.
A little while ago, I wrote about the tools of my writing life and how few they were. I mentioned that if we had been talking about embroidery, the whole thing would be different. For a start, there are my threads, scissors, needles, a fraction only of which I have pictured.
As I continue to write The Shifu Cloth, my share of the blog posts for The Masked Ball, the short story for The Masked Ball miniature book and the edits to Paperweights, I am finding my mind has to compartmentalise. To be frank it isn’t easy and when I return to both Shifu Cloth and Paperweights, I find I have to read a significant amount of the previous chapters to ground myself in the flow of that particular work. Which is probably why I choose to make the story posts I contribute here, fairly light, spoofish and V.V. short. So here we go with my next contribution, with the help of the wicked face of Guy of Gisborne alias Niccolo de Fleury.
The world of Eirie
Wonderful prizes for the Masked Ball on May 1st . . . each of the competitions on the night will have a beautiful prize:
My embroidery bag
‘When I’m not writing or tweaking my computer, I do embroidery.’ This remarkably apt quote for my life comes from Lynn Abbey, fantasy writer. I was googling quotes today and this is the one that popped up in respect of embroidery and I figured the Fates had conspired to entice me to write on my stitching.
