The Little Prince

I'm know I'm not the only one who shares a fondness for this beloved children's book, right? I wasn't introduced to it until high school, when we read it for my second-year French class. It was a difficult read at first, but once I understood what was going on, I fell in love, just like everyone else. 

I'm a big book lover (still waiting for my in-home library to happen!), and when I started traveling abroad, I decided that I wanted to get a book in the language(s) of every country I visited. One of my first stops was the Basque province in Spain, where I couldn't figure out just what to get, so I picked up a Roald Dahl book (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, maybe?) on a whim. But the more I traveled, the more I realized that I wouldn't always be able to spend countless hours searching for the *perfect* book in whatever bookstore we happened to cross. I'm not sure what made me think of it, but eventually I decided that collecting the same book in a variety of languages might be a good way to go. Given The Little Prince's popularity (making it easier to find), along with my love for the story, it was settled. 

 [Copies in French, Spanish, Italian, Norwegian, Swedish, Czech, and German. It was really really hard to find a copy in Arabic, unfortunately, and there are a few others I'm still missing.]

Fast-forward almost ten years, to a point where I felt that, amongst all of the other hobbies that I can perform at a level somewhere between mediocre and decent, I needed to throw embroidery into the mix. I'm going to blame this pin for the idea: 

[Olympia Le Tan book clutch]

Do you guys have any idea how badly I want one (or all) of these? Charlotte's Web never held any particular appeal for me, but The Little Prince? Now that's a different story. (I think I'd really like a Harry Potter one, too, and...others that are TBD at the moment.)

However, I thought it would be a good idea to get just a *little* bit of embroidery practice before launching into something like this, right? I set off to Google images and found a couple of designs I liked (with the title in French, naturally), and got to work. 

All in all, this really didn't take too long, and I'm pretty pleased with the results.

I got to practice quite a few techniques, including a satin stitch (which I then outlined in a back stitch, because it was really quite messy)...

...French knots and Lazy Daisys...

...and some proper back-stitching.

I still need to clean it up a bit, a.k.a. trim the edges, find the right hoop (this one's my favorite to work with and cannot be relegated to a wall), and back it in something so it's suitable for hanging.

Does anyone else have any embroidery experience? I've already got about a million more projects lined up, I figure it'll be a good way to while away the cold winter hours that will be here before I know it.