A Bluestocking Knits

Stitching, Stitching

I am on the home stretch with the "Patience" sampler, with just a few more repeats of the green border, about half of the red flowers, and filling in the rest of the tiny landscape.  I'm still getting a big kick out of it, the over-the-top-ness of those letters!

(You can see where I changed my mind, not having believed the designer when she said to use two threads for the double running stitch around the letters -- I did Q, R, and S with one thread, then realized that she was probably right, and carried on with two threads, going back over R and S later to plump them out, as it were.  Haven't done Q yet, as I can't decide if it looks anemic or if I should leave it!)

Continuing my series of mini-quilts-turned-placemats, here is one to the "Brick Road" pattern from Temecula Quilt Company, the original of which ended up in my sampler quilt.  (I am not exactly learning to love orange, but perhaps at least to accept it ... in very small doses ...)

And the Broken Dishes from Prairie Children and Their Quilts by Kathleen Tracy.  This one is a kind of friendship piece, the whites being almost all TQC's but the others being some of my own stash (including scraps left from Laura's quilt and my big half-square triangles), some of Betty's from the estate sale, and some from a garage sale at the end of my street a few weeks ago -- we shared a wry laugh about fabric acquisition.

I'm enjoying the smallness of these projects, easily manageable in a few days, even the hand-quilting.  Very satisfying.

And -- I couldn't believe my luck -- at a swap meet a few weeks ago I found this sampler dated 1830, and bought it for a song, a pittance.  I was not surprised when I sent a photo to Amy Finkel and she replied, briefly but kindly, that it is not worth conserving, but very happy when she agreed that it is indeed from 1830.  I plan to rechart it ...

The Pomegranate Sampler

The "Pomegranate Sampler" by Darlene O'Steen, from the May/June 1986 issue of "Just Cross Stitch" magazine.  I think this is one of her earliest designs, which is all the more impressive, that she started off at this level of excellence.  I enjoyed every moment of working this sampler -- even the frustrations of having to pick out mistakes (of which I made a number) were only fleetingly annoying, because it was a pleasure to have it in my hands.

I did make a few changes in the blue alphabet -- frankly, it surprised me not a little that she made some slightly tortuous modifications to two of the As when simply re-spacing the words would allow the full letter to fit, but there it is -- my quirk is that I deeply appreciate a beautifully-spaced alphabet and therefore will go to some trouble to get it! 

I had bought a lovely selection of overdyed threads, but as I said before, I ended up using only two of them, Old Blue Jeans for the eyelet-stitch alphabet and Used Brick, which is the darker pink of the "strawberries" and other bits throughout -- these are both by Crescent Colors.  (Partly this is due to the fact that there just aren't enough overdye shades to make reasonable equivalents to the range of DMC or Anchor threads ... I will certainly remember in future that most of the conversion charts online are in some cases wildly "approximate"!)  The other colors I used here are for the most part the DMC ones that O'Steen suggested as an alternative for the original Au Ver à Soie silks.

The fabric is Weeks Dye Works' 32-count linen in "Cocoa".

I still don't really like working eyelet stitch, but they look lovely in that blue, don't they!

I couldn't really tell from the just-not-quite-clear-enough photograph on the cover of the magazine, but it seemed to me that the satin stitch was running all in the same direction, i.e. that the top and bottom were meant to be short vertical stitches and the sides to be long vertical stitches.  This seemed a bit reckless to me, having long floats of thread lying on top of the fabric, and it seemed far more thrilling to me to miter the corners of the border, so that is what I did.  (And as I said, O'Steen's tip in The Proper Stitch of working it with one thread in the needle going round twice, instead of the potentially-twisting two making a single pass, worked more perfectly than I could have hoped!)

Queen stitch is clearly a favorite of O'Steen's, as she uses it a lot -- I find it hard to get the threads to lie nice and flat, but it was worth picking out a half-dozen or so and doing them over!

I really like the way that some stitchers worked their family's initials in their samplers, and so the other biggish change I made was to re-do the signature panel in order to include them -- these letters are worked over one thread, which was tiny! --

Ukraine Solidarity

As a peaceful protest and as a sign of solidarity with the Ukrainian people, Antony of At the Point Studio has generously made this chart free to share as a stitch-along project.  For details on the symbolism of the motifs and colors, inspired by traditional Ukrainian embroidery designs, and a PDF of the chart, please visit his post here.