An Intro and a progress photo

Hi all, I joined weeks back but without a camera I didn't want to do my intro post with nothing pretty to add!

I'm Kyri, short for Kyrie-Eleison or Kyriaki depending on who you are (Kyriaki is my Greek Orthodox name and I use it a lot). I'm sooooo close to being 21 (April 12!) and the youngest HAED BB member I've come across, and apparently really young for the stitchy community in general. I live in Australia, down south near Adelaide. My Mum taught me to stitch when I was 4 or so, in an attempt to keep me busy and shut me up - it only worked for a short time before I figured out how to stitch and talk at the same time! I live at home with my folks and younger sister, who cope pretty well with the embroidery paraphenalia all through the house. My boyfriend is a jeweler and designer, and appreciates fine detail work and use of colour so he "gets stitching" even though he doesn't do it himself. Rhodium plating needles on the other hand...hehehe.

I rediscovered my love of embroidery in 2005 after being burned out by kits, and discovered HAEDs a few months later, and never looked back. My WIP list is a little horrific, which I'm attempting to fix, but I'm only working regularly on Dark Cherry for the SAL (and outside SAL weekends too) and Dance of the Graces (Fenech) for the SWIP SALs. I have a varied collection of artists in my charts, but some of my favourites are Sara Butcher, Selina Fenech, and Ching Chou Kuik. I actually MANAGED a finish for these charts last year in QS A Restful night:



My usual stitching approach is a weird take on parking, which works for me. I stitch 1x1 full cross on 32ct jobelan, and use Petite Treasure Braid in half stitch rather than the Kreinik which I don't like and find too bulky anyway. I use DMC, but I'd love to do a project in silks one day!

Here are a few WIP photos for you:

Dance of the Graces (Fenech)


QS Periwinkle Fae (Tate)

- I haven't worked on her in forever which is a shame, I really like her. This is a silkweaver hand-dyed, but I forget what the name is.

SK Iris Keeper (Wall)

Stitched on 32ct cream linen for a change.

I only really work on Cherry and occasionally DotG from this list, because I'm trying to work on just a few things and get finishes rather than worked across my whole WIP/UFO list and not making much visible progress. Hopefully I'll get into working on these last two at some point soon.

As for stitching for our SAL, here's my latest picture of Dark Cherry:


I usually work across the width of a piece if it's a QS, so the minute I got the second page I started it rather than finishing pg 1. I'm loving how it's all coming together!

I love looking at all the photos and watching progress, and this way we can all inspire one another.

Finally, I blog too - here, at Lighting Candles to Pray for Light. It's a bit of a hodgepodge blog with just about everything from my life in it, plus a nice dose of stitching whenever I have the camera available :)