Take to the Sea: a New Project in Progress!

UPDATE: this pattern and a matching felt project are now available in my Patreon pattern library!

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I have so many things in my "work in progress" pile, but what did I do this weekend? Yup, you guessed it: I started something new.

It's a gift for a friend who loves (or, should I say loved) the now-shuttered website The Toast. I wanted to stitch her a little something with one of the Toastie mottoes - Take To The Sea - and after an evening's doodling I eventually settled on a design with lots of waves and a little boat (with a T for The Toast, of course!).

I wasn't 100% sure how I was going to stitch the waves, so yesterday I made a start on embroidering the lettering and thought "well, I'll just see how this goes!"

The words and the boat are stitched with a very dark blue embroidery thread (floss) and backstitch. I'm a bit annoyed by that wonky T in the top line, but I am also trying to be a bit less of a beat-myself-up-about-tiny-mistakes perfectionist with my crafting so let's just ignore that and move on...

I tried out a couple of different options for the waves and decided to go with the most labour-intensive: filling in all the white space with backstitch in shades of blue.

This is gonna take a looooong time and use a lot of thread, but I'm really pleased with how it's looking so far. The text seems to be standing out nicely from the surrounding colour and I love the texture of the waves.

I'm not sure what colour(s) I'm going to use for the boat yet - maybe just white? We shall see. I've got a lot more waves to stitch before I have to make a decision about that anyway.

It's going to take me many, many evenings to finish this piece. Luckily the process is a very relaxing one! I'll be blogging about my progress and posting lots of pics over on my Instagram.