Procrastination is the art-killer.

Who said that? I did, just then. I would believe it too, up until about 4pm yesterday I was having a very unfocused day, distracted, starting things, stopping, forgetting what I was doing. All quite annoying and not very me. But then I obviously got my shit together and did most of the Crab apple you see above. Other things I did/was distracted by:

Moving house chaos in the spare room.

More tidy and lovely light-filled lounge. So much floor space!

Fox in the garden! I never seen one before. We call him Oscar.

Having a little wood burning/staining session in the kitchen.

All varying degrees of usefulness. I think really I was putting off doing the Crabapple because initially I thought I would get a bead and wrap it in silk to make a completely detached 3D apple. But then I couldn’t find the right bead and had a little fret about the composition. As you  know I don’t do sketchbooks, and I barely ‘design’ anything; I have an idea and I make a rough shape or transfer pic and then I stitch it freehand. But because I wanted this to be a pendant, I didn’t want to have too many elements in it and also, having an apple-type element is a bit of a gift – easily recognisable, able to construct simply, nice colours etc. I scratched my head. I puzzled.

Here’s what I came up with:

Decided to do a detached slip for the leaf, in lovely variegated silk on to some calico. I did these before on the Hawthorn Blossom, and nice to see that I could actually remember how to do it without looking at my own instructions.

Put that to one side, now do the fruit (the POME if you’ve been paying attention)

Picked some nice hand dyed wool viscose felt in a rosy colour and stitched it down in a nice little puff, stuffing it with cotton batting. Then I started satin stitching over it in silk a bit like I did with the Acorn Pendant.

It’s slightly haphazard because of the puffiness of it, so the long stitches don’t want to lie regimentally flat. All the while I’m pondering on the nature of a crab apple that they’re not all uniform red, and I want to get some more russet type colours in. So I got some orange silk and started randomly weaving over the top of the red silk. This is what happened:

Photo doesn’t do it justice (when does it ever?) but it actually is very pretty. Then I sewed a little brown root out the bottom. Then I cut out and couched down the leaf to the top:

Not bad really! I need to get a felt tip and colour the edge of the leaf where the white calico is showing, and it’s not finished yet because I want to put a little stalk on there too.

Migo deciding if she likes it. She started trying to eat it after this so not sure if that’s good or bad.