Bits & Bobs

Ok, no apologies for my slackness in keeping my blog up to date, stitching always takes priority over blogging!

Fabric Club
Firstly, thanks to all who responded to my questions about Fabric Clubs. I did consider Silkweavers, they have some very appealing clubs on offer. The problem for me being it coming from overseas. Not that I have any objection whatsoever to buying supplies from the US, if I want something in particular I will buy it regardless of where it comes from! But in the case of fabric I can just as easily buy it from the UK so can't justify to myself the extra postage Silkweavers would cost. I emailed Tandem Cottage and they said their monthly club for £10 usually entails one fat quarter and two half fat quarters which seems good enough to me so I've signed up. I'll give it a go for a couple of months at least.

New Stash!
I bought some really ancient embroidery magazines off ebay, for a bargain price of 1p!! I don't know how old they are but the price on the covers is in old money so they've got to be at least 3o years old (I think we went decimal in the early 70's? I don't remember old money myself and was born in '66). Some of the designs are beautiful. Now, I am much more of a cross stitcher than I am an embroiderer so I'm not going to commit myself right now to actually embarking on any of these designs, but they're a nice thing to have. Maybe when I'm an old lady I'll embroider some flowers!


Castle Sampler

The Castle Sampler is plodding along slowly, I am now stitching the queen but she's more time consuming than the vines as there are a lot of colour changes. This project is now officially declared an original work of art. All of my projects are declared original once I have made mistakes from the pattern that I don't see the need to rectify. Its not as it was designed now so therefore it is original, which is my justification for going wrong! I stitched some of the vines in the wrong green, it doesn't notice ......

Lady with Lilac Flower

............Sigh..................
Ok its going ok, albeit slowly. I like to stitch in patches, particularly on evenweave fabrics, stitching one clear section of the pattern before moving onto another, the methodical method, its the way my brain works I guess. With this one the patch method is near enough impossible, the sections all sort of 'wash' into each other with no clear divides. There are very few backstitch lines to define the sections and to make it even more tricky the chart isn't divided into grid blocks of 10 like most charts are. Its a bit all over the place. Still, its progessing .... slowly.

Celtic Christmas

At the bottom of the skirt there are swirly patterns which use gold metallic thread. For fear of fraying the metallic thread I thought I would leave it 'til last, but its proving difficult to work my methodical patch method with leaving one colour out, I'm not marking this chart off as I go along (like I am doing with the other two), so I am losing trace a little of where I am. I managed to stitch one row twice which resulted in some major frogging this morning. For now, I am just going to concentrate on the areas which don't use the metallic gold. This project is not difficult, there are large patches in one colour, but some of the reds are so close in colour it is majorally difficult to tell one from another once they're actually in the farbic. Still, as I always say, I love a challenge!