Peonies in Pink + thimble making mumblings

All these pictures are taken in late April and early May but I did not get around to post them until now.  Probably because of the extra harsh summer last year all the flowers are on the smaller side and less in number, but they are lovely nonetheless.

 

Beverly at How Sweet The Sound is hosting a weekly Pink Saturday and from her web page you can visit a lot of posts in pink.  I wish you all happy pink weekend.

I have received a quick question from Sandi about one of my "how I do" posts.  She left me a comment on the post in question as an anonymous reader so I do not have any means to get back to her except replying here.  Sandi, I am sorry to expose you like this but I really do not have any choice.  Sandi asked for my confirmation if I used a single strand of size 25 perle cotton (like DMC's six strand ones) in the post where I talked about alternatives to silk.  Yes, I did.  A strand of size 25 embroidery floss is close to the size of the silk I use for my thimble making although the cotton perle is very softly twisted that the finished thimble lacks the certain luster of the tightly twisted silk gives.  I would like to wish Sandi happy stitching and hope she would join the photo sharing this month with her new thimbles.

Pat left me a comment on the previous post about her thimbles for April on Flickr.  She showed us two thimbles, one is scales design in lovely pastel rainbow colours, and the other one in brown is called "kanoko" in Japanese.  Textile people would know what kanoko is.  It's a kind of Japanese tie dye design.  The direct translation of kanoko is a baby deer.  The design is said to be resembled the back of the baby deer.  You know, there are spots on the back of Bambi?  By the way is there a designated name for babies of deer, like puppies and cubs?  Anyway her brown thimble is called "kanoko" design. 

I have been trying to assemble a thimble starter kit for you know how long and still not finished yet.  I firstly thought to sell the kit with all the materials apart from scotch tape and machine thread with an instruction booklet for base making and how to stitch two scales design. The booklet contains a lot of photos instructions and the printing cost becomes a problem.  At the moment my draft is A4 30 pages.  One set of 30 pages takes a lot of time with my printer and as I plant to sell it, it's just not practical.  Using copier costs expensive and as my business is very very small, utilizing printing service is out of question.  So I am now leaning to the idea of PDF file so that the customer choose to print it or view it on their PC.  I know not all of the countries use the same size papers.  Does my instruction booklet cause a problem where people do not use A4 size paper? 

I have another idea.  What do you think about on line thimble making courses?  You buy a kit from me and I mail the material and send a PDF file via e-mail.  Then you join the on line group like Yahoo and Google.  You will upload your finished work on the group' photo page and we can have a discussion board over the concern/question/whatever.  I would love to hear your thought.