This morning I found a fun new linkup called What’s On Your Workdesk? Wednesday (WOYWW), where artists and crafters share images of their workspace and projects they are working on. My “workdesk” is not always an actual desk. I like to work small, and I like to be comfortable, so most often I work from the couch or chair, and sometimes I even work in my sketchbooks in bed.

What I’m up to this week is embroidery. This is new territory for me. I think I did some cross-stitching as a child, but in general I’m pretty new to hand stitching. The beautiful colors of the embroidery threads always call to me, so last week I randomly picked out an assortment of colors that made me happy.

I’d like to transfer some of my pattern work to embroidery, so I started out with this diamond pattern. I quickly learned that embroidery is harder than it looks! The image above is a result of an hour or two of work. Admittedly, there was also some chatting, but I was surprised at how slow I was.

This past weekend I attended a craft meetup group in downtown Portland, and met Megan of Maxwell Handmade. She was nice enough to give me some tips, and I got to watch her create some beautiful fill patterns that she called practice. This morning I was poking around in her embroidery archives and found her how to posts on stitching and embroidery basics, as well as a beautiful piece with the most delicate work on three feathers. Super inspiring. But for now, I’m just practicing and hoping something good comes out of it.

And just in case you wanted to see my actual workdesk… this is it right now. Super small, totally messy and just about unusable. Maybe I’ll get it together tonight and clean it off.