Unexpected embroidery

I see a lot of books come in through work with titles like "Unexpected Soups" and "Unexpected Houseplants" or "Unexpected Knitting" and always laugh a little - like, did you not see that coming? You have to get ingredients or supplies.

I kind of get it now.

There's a knitter I follow (on ravelry) who not only knits sweaters at an impressive rate, but has embroidered some of them beautifully. One of the artists she got inspired by is Yumiko Higuchi who has written a few embroidery books, and work happened to have "Zakka Embroidery" available.

I looked through it and took it home to see if I would be inspired.

After some unplanned and random digging, I found the leftover floss from my western shirt, embroidery hoops, researched needles to see if I had the right ones (sort of), got out linen (her fabric of choice) from my stash, and started. Whoa. Unexpected.

The next morning, while running errands, I realized I was (unexpectedly) close to a store that was open that had embroidery needles, so ran in and got those. They worked much better.

After a few hours I had this:

And then I ran out of thread. And of course, this is the one color I had that was not DMC floss. But it had the equivalent color number on it! Off to JoAnns, the only store open late in the area that had embroidery floss.*

But would the color match?

I've embroidered before... 7 years ago. Pulling up those memories was  s l o w. There were stitches I made after which I said, "Oh right!" and then, "Not fixing it!"

I finished it up that night at, I think, 10:30. Despite the late hour, I noticed I was stitching much faster that when I started. Yay!

Then I thought, "What am I going to do with this?", figured out this little bit of embroidery would fit on the sleep mask pattern in the same book, and sewed it the next day.

I can't notice any color difference, can you?

So yeah, unexpected embroidery.

*One store is only open on Tuesdays for 5 hours?