It was my intention to do more essay reading today, but after spending the early part of my afternoon working in the yard with the (very hot) sun beating down on me, I am finding I lack the necessary energy to think too deeply at the moment. I did flip through my anthologies looking for something on reading or nature, I think I've read most of the essays falling into those categories. Everything else just felt a little too "meh" (not the essays fault I assure you, my own fault for getting too much sun).
What I really want to do this afternoon and for the rest of my evening is watch more MI-5 episodes and work on a new needlework project. I've just started season four, but after last season's rather graphic finale, I thought I might not be able to take much more. But here I am, glued to the TV once again. Maybe I do better with mysteries. Even though there is a certain amount of violence you can be reasonably sure that the sleuth will come out of their case with barely a scrape on them. But these poor MI-5 agents are just dropping like flies left and right. I think there is hardly an actor left from the first season. I do like edge-of-your-seat sorts of stories, but there is no certainty of a happy ending here. Oh, well, I guess I need my adrenaline fix, what can I say?
I rarely just watch TV. I usually have to have something else in hand as well, which means working on needlework projects. I may not get a whole lot done, but I do make progress. I decided I wanted something more traditional to work on, so I've started stitching a band sampler. I found the design in Brenda Keyes's Traditional Samplers. You can see what the finished design will look like in the top photo, and here is my progress so far.
These initial bands are not especially exciting, but the repetitive nature of them means I can easily watch TV and still work on my stitching. Band samplers were quite popular in the seventeenth century (known as the golden age of sampler making) and they consist of rows of border patterns, alphabets, and sometimes verse or poem. Needlework was a very marketable skill at this time. Women would use these designs on their household linens, and a more skilled needleworker would have a large repertoire of designs under her belt. The samplers would be used a sort of reference tool as well, hence the various bands of patterns. As the sampler progresses the patterns and stitches become more complicated and fancy.
This is a design by Brenda Keyes in the style of the period rather than an actual reproduction, but I would love to find a design that is based on an actual work (there are several companies that create charts from actual samplers). So, you can see what I'll be working on tonight. And we'll see how many episodes of MI-5 I can get through tonight.