The spear mice advance!

The archers are all in place and the spears are advancing towards battle.

Deploy the archers!

The mice have finished their fortifications and are sending out the archers!

Mouse castles!

I've transferred the pattern and made a good start on the stitching. The blue mice have their castle and the red mousies are soon to follow. I'm liking how the design is stitching up. I went with DMC cotton floss for this one, since it's for kids and silk seemed a bit overboard. Ok, silk seemed like a fabulous idea, but one of my friends called "reality check" on me and was correct. The cotton is looking good, so I am happy.

Now that the project planning is done and I've actually started, I wanted to give a shout out to the awesome blog "Got Medieval" which inspired the design for this project. I was looking around for a cute little pastoral scene for a kid's project and remembered the epic mouse versus cat marginalia battle. I've wanted to do something fun with it for a while, so I seized the opportunity. I didn't have enough stitching space to do the poor, defeated kitties artistic justice, but that may just be another chapter in their sad tale. Here is the thread of the tale of the cats versus mice.

• He Hates Meeces to Pieces
• Revenge of the Stripey Kitties
• This Post Doesn’t End Well

Floche doodles

I bought some DMC cotton floche on a trip to the embroidery store and have been meaning to give it a test drive for a while. It is so smooth and soft, and such a nice fiber that I couldn't wait any longer. I pulled a motif from a handy Dover book, "Early Medieval Designs from Britain for Artists and Craftspeople" and started doodling with split stitch. It took me a few rounds to get a good feel for working the fiber, but I really love it. The stitches really work themselves nicely together for a pretty flow with stitch direction. The floche is a small thread though, so I need good lighting to do the split stitch. It's fairly tedious, but it's the kind of tedious that I frequently find relaxing. I took a quick picture of stitch progress on the frame along with the floche skeins.

Finished knotwork

I finished my knotwork last week and am finally posting a picture :) I'm not sure what I'm going to do with it, but its just the right size to be sleeve trim, so maybe I'll make it a companion. I've decided that I really do like the sleekness of silk split stitch. Its just so shiny and pretty.

Knotwork progress

Some more progress on my knotwork:

Knotwork distractions

I've found a stitching distraction while I'm planning my next brickwork project. I saw some split stitch Celtic knotwork on one of my embroidery lists and it was so pretty that it really inspired me. It was the perfect excuse to use this weird Indian silk I got on a late night ebay bid. I got the design from "Early Medieval Designs From Britain" by Eva Wilson which is a nice little Dover book. The design is from #36-37 "Interlaced dogs and birds from the Lindisfarne Gospels, British Library". I think its turning out really nice. Here's my progress so far: