I have finally joined the second corner of the Eternal Queen-Stitch Flowers border on the "Virtue" sampler -- oh, it's tedious sometimes, but I'm happy with the results! Strangely, I don't think that, area-wise, queen stitch takes much more time than cross stitch, but it sure feels like it. On the bright side, the colors of the DMC threads -- I'm using the same list as in the original -- are richer than they are in the photo on the cover of the chart, which is pleasing.
By the way, here are some more mini-quilts-turned-placemats that I just found languishing in my drafts folder (!) --
Above is a riff on the "Snowball" block, but done in English patch-work because a) I wanted to try that, and b) I didn't want seams across the white squares. I had some trouble with the fit of the white squares and had to quietly (guiltily) trim off a bit here and there, I guess because I didn't get the pieces aligned as well as I should have, but I'm really happy with the result, and this is already one of my favorites in the set.
And below is a "Windowpane" from the instructions in Kathleen Tracy's Small and Scrappy, enlarged by one column to make a rectangle instead of a square.
But despite the call of samplers, I am for the most part focusing on Julia's soi-disant kelp forest quilt, as she has been accepted at her first choice of university, and is off to live on campus in early September!
This was sewing the blocks into strips --
and the strips into a quilt top --
and now I can be found most evenings with a quilting hoop in my lap, a thimble on my finger, and the ceiling fan on full-blast because it is hotter than July!
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