Rainy Ladybug Days

It's been raining here again quite a bit, which means I've been re-watching the BBC's 1995 Pride & Prejudice mini-series (the one I like to think of as the "definitive" version, and five meandering hours of it, so you can really savor it). And watching those Bennett sisters whiling away the long hours in drawing rooms with their needlework got me in the mood to do some embroidery. The credits open with a beautiful embroidering sequence, too (I know, high action in Austen's work), so that surely helped plant the idea.

One of my cousins is having a baby girl soon, so I decided to decorate a little cotton jersey hat for her. At first all I could think of was ducks and bunnies, and I wasn't feeling too inspired, but then a ladybug crawled across the windowsill. I always like a ladybug motif.


I did them freehand, with a few false starts, and interspersed each bug with a flower or a butterfly. I put in the pale blue stitch trails to add a sense of movement and try to tie the different elements together (all the flowers and butterflies used some of the pale blue, too).

I started out with simple daisy-type flowers (blue ones, though), but by the end I got daring with this stalk of bluebells. One of my life's ambitions is to see a bluebell wood (wooded area carpeted with bluebells) in bloom. Another thing I learned about from watching too many period British dramas.