I’m very sorry for the radio silence in recent months.  As any long-term followers of my work are aware, my health can make my pace of work rather slow, and sometimes unpredictable.  I did a lot of things in the early part of 2016, enough so that I severely burnt myself out and set back my healing by a significant amount.  That resulted in nearly four months of debilitating fatigue and extremely low activity.  In the past few weeks I’ve finally been starting to feel more like I did before wearing myself out, so I’ve been trying to put energy into the adulting things that have been ignored, like house cleaning.  It’s slow, and nothing my readers need to know about in detail, but I have been moving fairly consistently again.

I have worked on a couple things during those months, but I have not been able to get good photographs of the first one, another hand-sewn Viking underdress.  Fingers crossed that I’ll manage it in the next couple months.  I did take some good detail photos of inserting a skirt gore into a slash by hand, so I will be able to write a short tutorial on that.  The second project is another Viking hood on which I am doing experiments, and I’m not sure if it’s turning out OK or if it’s ugly as sin.  I will post photos when I’m a bit further into it and you’ll be able to see what I am attempting.  Fingers crossed that that one turns out decent looking when it’s done.  I also did a small amount of weaving, which I should photograph and share with you as well, whenever I get around to that.

Some Workshops!

On September 24th and 25th, I will be at Collegium of the Desert teaching four different classes.  It’s an SCA event, so medieval costume and theme all around.  These are all classes I have taught before, but I needed to make new kits and I significantly revised by Basics of Opus Anglicanum article.  On Saturday I will be teaching how to pattern and make t-tunics and tunic dresses, and how to hand sew seams, both in the afternoon.  On Sunday I will be teaching Elizabethan Freehand Blackwork in the morning, and Opus Anglicanum embroidery in the afternoon.

This means I hope to restart the Opus Anglicanum stitch-along very soon.

This week I’ve also been revisiting the Spoonflower fabrics and blackwork embroidery designs.  I have sold only a handful of pieces of the first two prints, so I decided any commission I make on Spoonflower fabrics will just go back into buying samples of more prints.  Over the summer I did set up and order samples of nine more fabric designs, five of which work great as they are, and four of which had to be revised because they had too heavy a line weight to easily embroider over.  I’m also looking at how to digitally create more detailed blackwork designs for more dynamic fabrics, wallpaper, and giftwrap to use as-printed.  The next fabric design is already publicly visible, so if you want to go take a look you can find it here.  In the very near future I will be making a post highlighting just that fabric, and I hope to release a new fabric every 1-2 weeks thereafter.

So, in summary, downtime is dull and results in nothing interesting to post, but I’m back on the mend, so I hope to have lots of new things to share with you in the months to come.