One of my favourite sayings has always been ‘the cup in your hand is already broken’. It’s a helpful little reminder not to be too attached to things. So what to do when someone drops something on one of your favourite cups and takes a chunk out of it? Well you could use it as a handy little embroidery tools storage pot so you still get to look at the prettiness.

My new herbal tea design is out as an embroidery pattern and panel this week. It is inspired by an awful lot of tea drinking over the last couple of summery months. My favourite is by Tarn and moon and called ‘magic tarot tea’. I love it because it starts out blue but then you add lemon and it turns purple (although it looks quite pink in the picture). Nothing like a bit of magic to go along with your stitching. And, as an added bonus, it comes from Yorkshire, where I grew up.

So the herbal tea pattern is finally finished. I really loved working with these folky colours and stitching all the flowers and ferns. It feels full of summer for me. I have it available as a pattern and it will also be available as a panel and there may be a few kits too.

Unfortunately, speaking of not getting too attached, my lovely printing lady has retired and so I will no longer be able to have the designs printed on this particular cotton. I am looking at a lighter cotton with another printing company that might need a piece of backing fabric behind it so the darker threads don’t show, so you would be stitching through two pieces of fabric. It’s a lovely cotton but just a little thinner.

This means that the panels I have available now are the last ones that will be printed onto the thicker cotton so if you have been holding out for a particular one now would be the time to grab it as there may be a gap before I get the new ones in.

The winter coffee pattern would make a lovely companion piece to the herbal tea design. Winter coffee is designed for a 6” hoop but you can enlarge the pattern by about 115% and it should be about right for a 7” hoop.

On the home front last weekend we were lucky enough to have the whole family together for the first time in such a long time. We were also lucky enough to bump into some friends who insisted that we have an impromptu family portrait so this is very rare photographic evidence of all of us together.

And my littlest girl has just turned 21! Sadly she was back in London so we couldn’t be with her on her birthday but we will be visiting soon to celebrate with her.

Now I’m ready for a summer staycation, hopefully with plenty of sunny weather for outdoor stitching and lots of sea swimming.

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