Welcome to The Floss Box blog!

I hope everyone had a great New Year! I have my first finish of the new year to share.

I just finished this last night. It was pretty quick and fun to stitch. I've been a bit inspired lately looking at pictures of antique samplers. I like them, but I want something a bit more fresh and modern looking, so this is my first result. I'm playing around with some more ideas.

I've hopped on the social networking bandwagon finally. I put up a personal page and one for my website. Click her to visit. I'm not so good with the stream of updates about what I am doing, but I hope it at least helps me focus on keeping up with adding new content here. One must have something to post there after all!

I am working away on this one still. I got a new camera for Christmas! So I am taking this picture because the colors are a bit truer now. And hopefully all my future pictures will be much improved.
I saw this cool antique embroidery at a family member's house this weekend, so I thought I would share it here. It's silk embroidery.
And a close up:
It's very fine, small stitching. Really neat to see.

I started a new project this week. I haven't been doing much mad stitching, but I have managed some! So here is how far I have come on the Winter Sampler project. I'm pretty happy with how it's turning out. I will keep working on this while I plan some new embroideries.
For once there is some snow for the holidays, although the melting has already begun. It was quite pretty when it was fresh.

I just finished this project last night. It turned out pretty well, I think. I followed the book's picture as well as I reasonably could, but in the end I just had to make some decisions myself where to put the colors. It wasn't really hard at all to blend two shades for each color field, nor to switch shades over each row of stitches. I'm definitely going to try another project in the book, but not yet. First there are exhibition projects that I must begin!

I have made some progress now. This design is from Trish Burr's Long and Short Embroidery. So far, things are going fine. But I do have a small irritation, and that is that the colors in the book's photo do not match reality. The greens are far browner than what you see in my picture. It makes things a bit tricky since there is no color code to follow. You have the list of threads, and have to study the picture to figure out which should be used where. It's not easy! However, I gave up the idea that mine will look exactly like the book's photo, and instead I try to focus on making nice stitches and color gradients. The flowers will be a bit more challenging than the leaves, so we will have to see how well my strategy goes!

My latest finish: I call her "Morgan". This design is based on a cross stitch design that I made and stitched earlier this year: Very different stitching techniques, but still very similar! Now I have begun a thread painting project from one of the books I bought last week. I will be posting a progress picture when I have a little more done. I picked a really challenging one, so we shall see how it goes! :)