Colouring In with a Hook

Colouring books for grownups have become a real hit in the last five or six years. You can’t hardly visit a bookstore, stationery shop, or anywhere else involving paper-based products being retailed to the public at large, without happening across a selection. Usually, if the retailer is clever, with coloured pencils stationed close at hand, because who has yet recovered from the childhood passion for a fine array of coloured sticks?

I have yet to fall to the temptation of the adult colouring book (though I’ve coloured in a Book Depository bookmark or two in my time). Yet a new passion for colouring in has seized me, not involving pencil or crayon, but hook.

Some of you may recall that I developed an obsession a couple of years ago (how time flies!) with the form of embroidery known as tambour. The obsession went on the back-burner with the book idea that it came with, but it’s been simmering away, and recently, as the book idea moved to the front burner, so did the obsession.

Here’s what my first efforts on ‘real’ fabric – as opposed to netting – produced. (Those of you with fine artistic sensibilities may wish to avert your eyes.)

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Deep Rest

How exactly does one rest?

As I have had occasion to mention before (here and here), the Caped Gooseberry and I have different ways of relaxing, and this was something we were advised to address in our pre-marriage counselling. (Counselling: not necessarily because you have problems, but because you want to avoid having problems.)

potatoes with faces on tiny couch

The Caped Gooseberry finds strategy games relaxing. His hobby: thinking about stuff. (Makes him very hard to buy presents for, let me tell you.) I, on the other hand, find strategy games about as relaxing as running for a bus. In the rain. In badly fitting shoes. But I do like watching DVDs (not restful at all for the Caped Gooseberry) and reading (silently, to myself). All about the stories, me.

Except…

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After And, Er… Before?

I have learned my lesson: before and after makeovers are much more impressive if you have a picture of Before.

I took the sleeves off my favourite dress last summer – despite the seams being both sewn and overlocked they were still coming adrift in places – and happily drafted a post about it. Only to find that I had no pictures of the dress from the four plus years I wore it avec sleeves. Despite wearing it probably twice a week, year round, all through that time.

Unclothed woman behind question mark sign
What DID that dress look like?
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