Just keep marching/stitching on.

Marching on...

Well my trip back to the tram stop yesterday after work was every bit as agonising as I expected, so I took myself off to the doctors this morning to get my toe looked at.

This was a painful experience in itself, as I had to register before I could be seen. This meant at least 10 mins spent convincing the receptionist that I was eligible to register at this surgery despite me falling outside their cachement area (I'd previously spent about 2 weeks establishing this right with the NHS authorities!). Then I had to fill out all their forms, and then I had to have a medical with the nurse (very nice lady) before a doctor could see me. Then I finally got to see the doc. The diagnosis: septic wound; The cure: a course of horse pills antibiotics =)

All this took about 2.5 hours of my morning and I got home about 11:30. My boss was very understanding and suggested I would be better taking the rest of the day off, rather than dragging myself into the office for a couple of hours work. Apparently when he was talking to me on the phone yesterday he could tell the pain was getting to me by how I sounded through the day (nice boss).

Stitching on...

I've had a bit of a stash explosion recently. The latest to arrive was Heirloom Birth Sampler which I've been waiting to get going on, and the overdyed threads I’d ordered to stitch it with. The original is stitched using mostly ecru threads with a small amount of colour. Although I love the design it just seemed too bland for me, so I decided to try using overdyed threads in place of the ecru and then pick the colours for the ribbons and lettering to match. I chose Eterna Silks because the design calls for stranded cotton and Perle 8 and 12 all in the same colour and they were the only place I found that did all three in the same overdyed colours. Since I couldn't immediately choose I ended up ordering three different sets of colours but once I got them it had to be Pistachio.

It's quite a deceptive design. It looks like it should stitch up quite quickly but all the speciality stitches are taking longer than I expected, although it is the first time I've done a lot of these stitches so I probably should have realised they'd take longer. Fortunately the instructions for most of them are given in the leaflet and are quite clear. The exception is the hardanger section. I have done a bit of hardanger before but there's stitches in this design that I haven't done and no detailed instructions for them so I'm going to have to dig out my little hardanger stitch book =)