Meeting another 123stitcher

One of the highlights of my vacation was meeting and stitching with Rachel [aka rspory]. Anyone who follows her blog, What seems like crazy on an ordinary day, will know that she is a gifted stitcher. But what you may not know is that she is a generous and charming lady with whom it is a delight to spend some stitching time. Our day started with a pleasant lunch, delayed slightly by some most unpleasant weather ... Rachel had to wait for the downpour to abate a bit before braving the roads. But by the time we finished eating, the weather had decided to cooperate. We stitched for a couple of hours on the beach. Rachel worked on a SNN kit which featured a horse drawn sleigh, very pretty stuff. I worked on Workbasket's Quaker Rooster [see yesterday's post for a photo of my progress there]. We discussed everything from local needlework shops to designers we favored to Secret Needle Night kits over the years to more general stuff like jobs, antique glass, Community Sustainable Agriculture coops, our mutual love of beaches, our ideal homes [Rachel dreams of a farm with a huge vegetable garden,chickens and horses and cattle but big enough for a dirt racing track far away from the animals; I dream of a state-of-the-art environmentally self-sustaining cottage on a hill overlooking water and room enough for a greenhouse, a garden, some chickens and some bee hives.] It was a lovely afternoon.

Rachel gifted me with an adorable little Mill Hill bead kit of a sailboat [I couldn't resist starting it the very next day] . I'd never done one of these little treasures and I love trying something new ...

... as well as some of the neatest beach finds I have seen in a long time: fossilized shark teeth and ray dental plates as well as a bit of petrified wood. These things were tiny ... I am amazed that Rachel was even able to find them ... but she must be a devoted and sharp-eyed collector because she has quite a few of these specimens and was most generous in sharing some with me. She'd like to find a way to incorporate them into her stitching ... I admit to being stymied as to how she might do this ... but I'll give it some thought. The shark teeth look like thorns and might be included in a botanical piece with roses ... and, of course, might be included in a piece featuring sharks or other marine predators. But beyond that I can't think of much.

I gave Rachel a biscornu stitched with a silk floss called Jellybean [Vikki Clayton, I think] which has a palette of soft tropical island colors and anchored with some silver buttons etched with a sun motif. She seemed pleased with it and I hope it will remind her of a delightful afternoon spent stitching on a beach

Here is a photo of the two of us, on the patio of my hotel room, stitching in hand ... after the rain returned to chase us back inside, it let up almost immediately ... so we stepped out onto the patio.

Rachel is on the left and I am on the right.