This band was adapted from a larger motif -- both transcribed by Louisa Pesel -- from a German sampler dated 1661, now in the V&A (accession no. 368-1907).
While I was working it, I noticed a flaw in my fabric a little way down, where one of the horizontal threads had broken somehow --
Luckily for me, it was only one thread, and so I winkled the two broken ends out of the weave a bit and pulled them to the back, then with a length of thread that I pulled out from my zigzag at one side, long enough to comfortably hold in the needle, I wove that new thread back in along where the broken one had been. It looks ever-so-slightly obvious at this point because the new thread of course has those tiny creases from the over/under weave and so doesn't sit quite comfortably, but it's subtle enough --
I left the long ends of the replacement thread at the back, in hopes that the blackwork stitching would have plenty of opportunity to catch them down securely!
As for the change of tack, I've been alternately thinking, "There's no way that this is enough thread," and "we-ell, it might make it ...." At exactly halfway along, I had used up two of the four skeins I bought at The Attic plus the partial skein left over from "Philadelphia Vine" Of course, each band is going to use a different amount of thread depending on its denseness and the efficiency of my stitching, but even so getting halfway and using more than half of my four skeins of thread means pretty obviously that two skeins likely wouldn't be enough to finish. I have already snuck in a number of strands of the "Cranberry" skein I had on hand, which is a slightly more scarlet red than the "Rosewood" -- I've used one strand of each, hoping that the variations would be subtle enough, and I think this is working pretty well.
But at halfway through the ninth band, I thought, "Right, I've got one full skein of 'Rosewood' left," and I'd rather use all of it, if I can, instead of a blend of the two colors, and so I've decided to jump down to the bottom of the chart and work my way up instead, so that any more blends that I need to incorporate will be both minimal and interspersed with the "Rosewood". It seems a bit absurd, looking at how little is actually left to stitch, that a whole skein of silk might not be enough, and maybe I'll laugh at myself when it's finished and I do have "too much" ... but getting exactly halfway along and having used up more than half of my thread has made me very skittish indeed!
It was quite a bit of luck, by the way, that the little "ribbon" band landed exactly over my mend, catching those long ends I left. Whew! I'm going to thread that last end under as well --