Chucking it down

After a long hot (and fairly dry but not as much as last years') summer we are getting the first good Autumn rain today. It is raining fairly hard, hence the phrase 'chucking it down' which just means raining hard. It was reported in our local news that for the first time in almost a decade the whole of Australia is free from drought. Lucky us! It has been so dry for so long that we let some of our gutters get a bit old and ignored a rust spot by the front door... now the rain funneling through the small hole in the gutter, falling onto the pavement path and driving me nuts. I'll be lucky to sleep at all tonight if it keeps up.

On the positive side (not that I am failing to see the positive of the lovely rain) I am catching up on my Ladybug temari that I am stitching with the TC stitch-a-long. I realise that everyone else is almost finished but that doesn't bother me. I marked my C10 weeks ago and planned to add marking lines to make a T6... but I just couldn't get motivated to do the marking. I did pin out about 1/4 of the ball but things kept getting in front of doing this... like working at a new job, school holidays, baby shower, birthday and funeral wake baking.

Image from: http://www.how-to-draw-cartoons-online.com/

This week I decided to abandon the plans for additional markings on my temari and just start stitching as a C10. This means that there will only be 20 ladybugs to stitch and 12 areas for flowers and lots of in between places for smaller blossoms and leaves.  I have decided to make my ladybugs follow each other around a path on the ball, like when you stitch a HHG on a C10, the bugs will spiral from the north pole all the way down and around to the south pole. I am stitching the bugs using the first method outlined by Debi.

I also did some research on what flowers attract ladybugs. It seems that mostly they are yellow and orange flowers, some are white. I thought instead of stitching the kiku or lazy daisy style flowers that many other people are using I'd try some of these suggested flowers. This is just a thought at this stage of course and I do reserve the right to do whatever takes my fancy at the time of actually stitching the flowers on :)

So far I've got 5 spotless, eyeless, antenaeless, black headed, outlined ladybirds and 2.5 red hexagons stitched. I've decided to stitch 5 at a time so it doesn't seem so overwhelming - not that it is overwhelming in anyway... I am just feeling a bit overwhelmed with life in general at the moment :)

I'll take an in progress shot of my ladybug temari tomorrow and load it on another post.