My doodle napkins.  All eight complete.

Overall, I’m quite pleased.  They were each individually fun and quick to stitch.  I did not agonize over them (although there are no mistakes).  Napkins are transient goods, destined for hard use, gravy stains, and wine spills.  Therefore I did them “quick and dirty.”  I used knots, rather than agonizing about ending off my double running stitch invisibly.  I used launder-me DMC and Sajou cotton threads, not silk.  And the napkins themselves after shrinking in the machine, sometimes through multiple washes, are all slightly different sizes, with almost a full inch of width/length difference between the smallest and the largest.  Frankly, I don’t care – they will all serve their purpose quite well.

This shot is for Anne, who asked to see how I was wrapping the borders around the corners of the main motifs:

I’m not going back and adding a secondary border to the first one I did.  Or at least today I’m not thinking about doing it.  The others were exercises in educated fudging. I was thrilled that the border on the last one (lowest green one on the right) worked out perfectly, both horizontally and vertically, to make four neat and symmetrical corners.  That was serendipity, not planning.

Now on to the tablecloth.  This one is going to be a challenge.  I’m using my sit-on hoop, with the bulk of the cloth gathered up and stuffed into a pillowcase that sits on my lap behind the hoop while I stitch. Not optimally comfortable, but necessary to keep the thing quasi-clean while I work.  The cloth itself as a ground is not as easy to count or as forgiving as were the napkins.  The threads are quite spindly and rather slubby, but I’m managing.

The design, like those on the napkins, is from my ever-forthcoming Second Carolingian Modelbook.  This one in particular is a challenge.  What you see here is less than an EIGHTH of the total repeat.  This pattern is the largest all-over I have encountered.  The artifact I charted it from (below) showed it in voided form, with the background filled by a heavily overstitched and meshy effect ground.  I am only working the foreground in double running.  Time is too short and tablecloth-hazard too likely for me to invest months in the very labor-intense original treatment of the background.

Special thanks to Christine Lee Callaghan (SCA – Lady Cristina Volpina), who unearthed the artifact from the collections of the University of Rhode Island, and provided spectacular photos of it to me, a byproduct of her own academic research.  The image below is hers, appearing here by permission

© 2014, Christine Lee Callaghan, of University of Rhode Island Accession Number 2003.12.286