This is an unusual week, summer-wise. I have something every evening until Thursday.

So all I did yesterday afternoon was work a bit on the "clandestine knitting" (Hi TChem!) and get out my big copy of "Amphigorey" and trace off some of the pictures of the Doubtful Guest.

My idea for the tea-towel is this: in one corner, a largish picture of him as he first appeared - standing outside the French doors with his scarf (only I'm not going to embroider in the French doors or the staircase or anything like that). And then the three other corners will show him "doing his thing" - dancing with the gramophone horn, ripping pages from books, and, finally, dropping things of which he is "inordinately fond" into the pond for safekeeping.

The only problem is the drawings as traced are a small bit too small. So I think I'm going to need to enlarge-photocopy them (probably enlarging the first drawing a bit more) and then mark them on the towel. Not sure yet whether I'm going to use a soft pencil and try to trace the drawings onto the towel (I don't have a light box but I do have sunny windows) or if I'm going to do what I used to do for self-designed embroidery and draw the patterns on thin tracing paper, and then fasten the paper to the cloth, either by basting it on or by depending on the hoop to hold it in place. And then you embroider, and then tear away the paper. Kind of like a cheap version of that dissolvable stabiliser stuff they sell for machine embroidery.

The only drawback is if you don't make your stitches fairly tight to begin with, and if you don't remove the paper carefully, the stitches loosen up and look sloppy. So I don't know which method I am going to use yet.

(Or I could go and buy some of that carbon-paper type transfer paper, and one of those little dressmaker wheels. Except I kind of don't want to buy MORE impedimentia right now, and I have tissue paper on hand already).

Also - thanks, Kucki! I had not seen that site before. Some of the figures on it are almost the right size to be line-drawings for embroidery! (Now I just have to see if I can do screen-grabs and print them). I do wish Moomin stuff were more widely available in the U.S. - I've seen the mugs for sale at a few online shops but they're more pricey than what I'd want to pay for a mug. The books are pretty easily found but there are other things available in EU markets (or sometimes in Japan; I understand they're popular in Japan as well) that don't make it here.