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I got some stitching done this weekend and was able to finish the third big motif, and start a small bit on the fourth. I think this finished one might be my favourtite, I love all the swirls. My estimate is that it took me about 7 hours to stitch all this, bringing the total to 50 hours so far.

There are several reasons why I love traveling to England. The lovely landscape, the weather (not too hot), the heritage, the museums, the language… and the books. I read mostly English books, and while they are readily available in the Netherlands, they are often twice as expensive as the recommended retail price in England. Also, I love medieval history, and I can find much more books on that subject in England than here. So anytime I travel to England, I have a long list of books I want to get, and I find even more.

On our last trip I packed light on purpose. We flew with Easy Jet, which means they are very strickt with the allowed 20kg per person, but also that the carry-on lugagge can be as heavy as you want. So, I took a bag with me that fit the exact measurements, and during the trip I loaded it full. In the end we got 42 new books. Twelve of those books were guidebooks, bought at the attractions, but the other 30 were real books…. :D.

Anyway, all my books were dutifuly entered into LibraryThing, so you can see them here.

We just returned from a great trip to the south of England. We flew into the London-Luton airport from Amsterdam. We had rented a car and picked up a brand new Ford Focus and drove off.

We first went to St. Albans, a short drive from Luton. We visited the cathedral there and had lunch. Afterwards we started on a hellish drive on the M-roads around London, to Canterbury. We got there in streaming rain, and after a bit found our hotel. After checking in we went to the city to check it out.

The next day we visited Canterbury, where we visited St. Augustine’s Abbey, the Canterbury Cathedral, the Museum of Canterbury and of course shopped a bit in the city. In the evening we had a lovely waterside dinner in the courtyard of a 16th century weavers’ house.

On our third day we drove from Canterbury to Battle. There we visited the Battle Abbey, built on the site of the Battle of Hastings in 1066. After our visit there we went to Pevensey Castle, where William the Conqueror and his armies set foot on land in 1066. We spent the night in a lovely B&B near Battle.

The next day we had a hellish drive from Battle to Portland, which was more queing than driving. We stopped for lunch at the Netley Abbey, the largest Cistercian Monastery ruins in England, which were completely deserted.

The hotel was on a high point of Portland, so we had a great view. Over the following two days we explored the Jurassic Coast. We visited West Bay, which had impressive cliffs, we sought and found fossils on fossil beach, we did a walk around Lulworth Cove, visiting Fossil Forrest and we explored Corfe Castle.

Then we drove on to Bath, but we stopped at Glastonbury Abbey, and saw the site of King Arthur’s tomb (no, it was really him, I swear ;)). In Bath we stayed in a luxurious hotel, from where we took the bus into town. We visited Bath Abbey, the Royal Crescent, the Museum for East Asian Art and of course the Roman Baths.

The last stop on our trip was Oxford, where we stayed on the edge of town, and on the way we visited Stonehenge and Old Sarum. Oxford was a bit too busy for our liking (many many school kids from Italy, Spain and France), but the Bodleian Library was beautiful and so were the colleges. We went to the cinema twice (Harry Potter 6 and Ice Age 3) and visited many bookstores, of which Blackwell was the most impressive and my favourite. We also visited the University Museum of Natural History and the attached Pitt Rivers Museum.

All in all it were jam-packed days, but we had a great time, and for us it was a perfect trip. See the slideshow of pics below.

On our recent trip to England I bought more cross stitch souvenirs from the same design company as the Tudor Rose bookmark I bought last year. This time I got two bookmarks, a scissor keep and a needle book. I started stitching the needle book and in about a week I finished it. So, here it is :D The scissor keep is matching, and I am regretful that I didn’t get any more matching items. Ah well, a good reason to return (or order online ;)).

I worked on the Vierlande again this weekend for about 9 hours. I started on the motif above my last finished one. I decided to first finish all the big motifs before filling it in with the little ones. As we will be going away again this weekend I expect to finish this one the coming weekend. This has cost me about 43 hours so far.

The Host by Stephenie Meyer
After reading the Twilight Saga I was tempted to also read The Host by Stephenie Meyer. The only book by Meyer not set in the Twilight universe, I was pleasantly surprised.

The premise is that the world has been colonized by an alien life form that takes over human bodies and minds. The main character of the story, Melanie, is a rebel who fights against the takeover, but she is caught and an alien, Wanda, is inserted into her body. Melanie’s mind however, refuses to give up, driving Wanda to do things that are unnatural for her species.

I like the story, the flow of it and the writing style. It took a while for the story to get going, but when it did it was very good. I also found myself understanding the emotions felt by the main characters. I recommend this book.

Sword of Shame by The Medieval Murderers
I have only recently discovered the writers collectively known as “The Medieval Murderers” even though three writers I really like are part of them, Susanna Gregory, C.J. Sansom and Michael Jecks. Other members are Philip Gooden, Bernard Knight and Ian Morson.

The set-up is a main theme (in this case the Sword of Shame) and each writer writes a chapter, a short story, using the theme and ‘their’ main characters (for example, Sansom writes a story about Matthew Bartholomew, etc.). This works out really well and leads to an entertaining book.

The main theme here is an Anglo-Saxon sword that seems to be involved in all kinds of negative situations, thus making people suspicious. It leads to all kinds of murder cases that our main characters can investigate and solve.

I loved the writing styles, and even though the stories were written by six different writers, in six different time periods (and also in a couple of different countries), they all flowed well together and made for a good book. I highly recommend it!

Company of Liars by Karen Maitland
After seeing it in the bookstores everywhere, and having it recommended everywhere to me from LibraryThing to Amazon, I couldn’t keep myself from picking up Company of Liars by Karen Maitland. It promised to be a story in the tradition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales set in the England of the Plague, 1348.

The story describes a journey, or a flight, undertaken by a group of (eventually) nine very different people, thrown together by fate. All nine have a story to tell, and are living a lie, whether they know it or not. Due to the fear of the plague, justice and the past, they have to keep on moving through the desolate landscape of an England that is suffering from bad (or non-existent) harvests due to unrelenting rains, and from the plague. They are being followed and slowly all nine have to face the truth.

The story is very slow to start, and very quick to end. I found this a bit disappointing. For as long as it took me to get to the action, I would have liked it to have lasted longer. The writing is very good, though Maitland uses a trick I absolutely hate. Numerous times during the story she let’s the storyteller say that “it would turn out to be grave error”, “that would not prove to be safe” etc. I would like to discover this myself as the story moves along, and this way it almost feels like a spoiler of some sort.

The book shows some of how hard life was during the plague and famine of 1348, and how people tried to survive, however, this is all background to the main story.

I would recommend this book to anybody with an interest in story telling, medieval England and daily life during the great mortality.

Not only did I not stitch on Mon Seul Desir for almost a month, now I see that I didn’t even upload Week 20. Well, here are both week 20 and 21. Total time spend on the piece is now 358.5 hours. I am way behind schedule, but I was just too busy and kind of had it with this project (sooo much work for so little to show for it). So, I hope I can still finish the top row this year, but if not, ah well, it is still a hobby, and it should always stay fun!

Oh, and BTW, that triangular shape in the middle is the top wing of a bird :D

It’s been a very long while since I posted, and also since I stitched. It wasn’t only the heat that kept me from it, I was also busy planning for my mom’s 50th birthday present, my own holiday and work work work. But, I finally got some stitched into the Vierlande again, and finished the second emblem. This one had a lot of backstitch, and was spread over two pages.

I decided I will work upwards from now on, finishing page one. I will do all the big emblems first however, before filling it in with the letters and smaller emblems.

I worked on it for 34 hours now :D.

Summer has officially begun here, with temperatures of over 25 degrees celcius… I didn’t stitch too much this week either, it is just too hot, and I get sweaty hands and a head ache from my hot lamp. I did manage to work on the piece one day, for 6 hours (total 340 hours). I am hoping to finish this half page next week, but the confetti is all that is left, so that will take me quite some time.

Even though I had the week off, I didn’t work on Mon Seul Desir as much as I wanted to. I rediscovered my Nintendo DS, and I was just a bit tired of stitching. Like I said before, this page will be done at the end of June, May was just too busy for one full page.

I worked 12 hours on it this week, for a total of 334 hours.