TRUE CONFESSIONS
I am very glad that I didn’t focus on making this piece two-sided.
At the outset, I thought about it. Hiding the ends on both Montenegrin Stitch and Meshy (Two-Sided Italian Cross Stitch, pulled tightly) are easy. Lots of real estate overstitched in which both beginnings and endings can be camouflaged. Double running is a bit more difficult, especially when one strand is used. Yes, I know various termination methods to do so – one-strand loop start and waste knots to begin; back-trace stitching, and threading through the existing line to end – but they are annoying to do, especially on a large piece. I made a half-hearted stab at it, but abandoned double sided double running early on, But I never thought it would be the two solid techniques that would be giving me trouble.
Here’s the front:
Here’s the back:
Montenegrin is working well. There are just a couple of bald spots where I lost track, mostly in angle changes. I blame resuming the habit of watching TV while I’m stitching. Occasionally I get caught up in the action, and miss a turn. Then don’t realize it until I am long past. Had I still been reverse-side-display focused, I would have done more diligent checking, and would have ripped back and redone the less than perfect bits.
Meshy on the other hand… Ouch.
The two-sided Italian cross stitch works best over large areas, like backgrounds in voided style pieces. It isn’t as cooperative when its playgrounds are small, as they are in these flower parts. It’s like working nothing but the bits where voided stitching bumps up against a foreground line, with no respite. Working these small parts I never quite get the rhythm – it’s all compensation stitches, with very little chance to display the openwork texture. That also means that coverage on the back gets slighted as working direction changes to adapt to the shape of the field being filled. Add to that the tension limitations of the cotton floss (more fragile than silk, believe it or not), and in spite of cotton’s fluffier nature, we have lots of bald spots on the back. Far from optimal for double sided display.
Finally then there’s my own general laziness. I’ve made a couple of mistakes that I’ve had to pick out. But instead of picking out large areas, I’ve mostly opted to pick out just the “broken” bits, tying off loose ends, or fastening them with overstitching on the back. Most of the fat or knotty looking spots above are from fixing mistakes. Sometimes the errors encroached on Meshy sections, and those are notoriously difficult to frog. Sometimes I ripped out small segments and replaced them because I didn’t feel like re-creating the large, accurate sections they were in, just to get at a couple of errant stitches.
So my back is a relative shambles. I will of course continue on, focusing on the front. But especially for those of you who tell me that my pieces are inhumanly perfect, please know that you usually only see the after photo, and lots of corrections and creative editing went into making the project look like that.
My Italian Fall
No international or domestic tumbles involved. Only, just like that, my fall project begins.
Yes, I am sticking with a project inspired by the big Italian towel/cover in my last post. I’m working it on a much smaller piece – a quotation rather than a full reproduction. I’m using the 19 x 27 inch (48.26 x 68.58 cm) piece of 40-count linen I mentioned earlier. That’s obviously less than the 381.89 x 582.68 inches (970 x 1480 cm) of the original. It’s very hard to make out the stitch or thread count of the original, but it does look like (most of the time) stitches happen over 4 threads. I couldn’t get close enough to get a dimensioned or scale-related photo of a strip, but I can say that I am working over 2×2 threads, and my individual motifs are smaller than on the original.
Although the size makes it a hint at the original, the design snippet I use will be a “larger” representation of the whole than it would have been if I had hit the stitch size of the original. More stitches per inch may make my pattern rendition smaller north/south and east/west, and will allow me to fit more repeats on my smaller cloth. Still nowhere near the repeat scale of the museum piece, though.
Now on to the stitches. I am using Montenegrin for the solid lines of green, red, and yellow. The Amy Mitten booklet Autopsy of the Montenegrin Stitch, Exhumed is invaluable for guidance on the various directional angles and corners needed. I used it before while stitching my long green sampler. It was what got me through the maze of this design:
I chose the squared back version of Montenegrin for the band above, but Mitten presents two versions, and I am using the other with a solid strip back for this one. Mostly for variety, and to see how the two compare.
Another stitch I used on Long Green is also present on this one. I call it “Meshy” but it’s official name is two-sided Italian cross stitch. I am using it for the solid infilling on the flower-like parts. Although it’s not called out in the MFA description, the closeup photos I took clearly show the mesh structure of the stitch, when it is pulled extremely tightly. Because of silk’s tensile strength, it works especially well for this stitch. You can see that mesh at large scale, with all ground threads bundled (none cut), completely covered by the silk in the Meshy part of my long, green sampler:
However, for this piece I’ve chosen DMC cotton floss – one strand. I wanted to work from stash, and to guarantee washability. In retrospect silk might have been a much better choice, allowing greater delicacy over all and a better defined mesh; but it’s pricey, and would be a new purchase. I’m putting off buying imports until a sane US international trade policy manifests.
Cotton doesn’t have the oomph of silk. Yanking on it to maximize the mesh effect can lead to breakage, and its bulk makes the filling more bead-like than lacy, especially in the narrow spaces of this design. Still, it’s not that far from the original, and if I’m careful I can teeter on the edge of destruction without actually shredding the thread. And working the narrow petal shapes in this stitch is proving out to be its own challenge. It shows and works much better in larger, open spaces.
I had toyed with making this truly two-sided. Meshy is two-sided, and the Montinegrin variant I picked has a not-exactly-the-same but close-enough reverse. And double running can be two sided. But I’ve already made enough mistakes and corrected them without pulling everything out (very hard to do with Meshy) that the back is compromised. I will settle for MOSTLY double-sided on this one.
Obviously there’s a ton more to do on this cloth.
I may move it to my largest Millennium scrolling frame. It’s just a hair too wide in its short side dimension (bottom in the photo) to fit on my next-to-largest one. But to do that since I have measured and placed my beginning to maximize the stitched field, I will need to add waste cloth or wide twill tape around the top and bottom. I need to add “real estate” for the scrolling rods to bite. And depending on how much tension I can achieve in the east west direction using my shortest set of extenders, I may want to add some twill to the long edges to accommodate lacing, too. But for now I’ll continue with the hoop. Working with it is much slower, but it is more portable, and I wander around the house quite a bit now as I stitch, to take advantage of changes in sitting venue.
Stay tuned, there will be LOTS more progress reports on this one. I hope they won’t be too boring. The pattern will remain mostly the same throughout the piece, but I do have several challenges coming up. For example, how to handle corners, and how to divide the framed plain linen center using double or single widths of the design. And if I do so, graphing out the supplemental edging sprigs, and how to place and space them.
On the health front, all continues well. Preventive radiation continues. No side effects ill or beneficial so far, although the superpower of magnified vision would come in handy. Mobility, sitting stamina, and general energy levels are increasing. I can make it around the house without a cane now, and only use it for going outside, or up and down the stairs. I’m a lot slower than I used to be, but even slowly, I can now get there. All is good.
AHA!
I’ve finally figured out what to stitch!
Two years ago Friend Merlyn and I went to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and saw an exhibit that featured (among other things) this Italian masterwork.
It’s described as a towel done in Punto Scritto and Punto a Spina Pesce MFA Accession 83.242, Italian, 16th century, silks on linen. In terms of size, this piece is big enough to be a table spread to seat eight, much bigger than anything I’d think of as a bath towel.
These stitch terms are used in MFA descriptions, but not many other places, and probably haven’t been updated since the initial acquisition and accession in 1883. Punto Scritto is clearly double running stitch. Punto a Spina Pesce (as far as I can figure) appears to be what we would call a form of long armed cross stitch (LACS) because the stitches that form each adjacent unit employ the same insertion/emergence spots, although modern stitches using that Italian name appear to spread the entry/exit points out, like herringbone stitch. I also note that the directionality of the individual stitch units as it rounds corners makes me think that execution was most like the Montenegrin stitch variant of LACS (more on this below).
I shared several photos of this at the time of our visit. And I put it on my list for redaction. Well, now is that time. I’m going to chart this one up, and then use the designs on a MUCH smaller cloth of my own. And as I look closer at this one, I think I will try to use a similar range of colors (but in cotton for washability), and the stitches I think look the closest to those of the original. At least on the front. I don’t see any photos of the back on the museum page in order to make totally accurate identifications, and am not impelled to write to request any. One thing I did note is that for the solid filled areas, the tightly pulled two-sided cross stitch variant I call Meshy was used. That isn’t credited on the museum page.
Another thing my close-ups show is that the piece was stitched over squares of four by four threads. There appear to be quite a few mis-hits and subsequent corrections where four by three or three by three threads were covered. This seems to pop up mostly in the curly bits that spring off the lily like flowers. I don’t know the actual count of the ground, and obviously couldn’t get up close enough to take a dimensioned photo, but I think that 2×2 on my 40 count linen will look close to the scale of the original.
Given that the Meshy and double running stitch bits can be done truly double sided, I have to think further on the use of something in the LACS family that is presentable on both sides. I’ll probably settle on Montenegrin. Both front and back of that are presentable, although the front does feature an additional vertical bar. It’s hard to make out on the photos, but some of the solid lines, especially the dark green ones that run the length and width of the piece do seem to sport a bar in places. But the deep yellow bits that run inside the motifs, don’t. Maybe the stitcher, noting the difference between the appearance of the two sides of the stitch chose to use the more open “reverse” on the front for the yellow bits, and what we consider the front of the stitch’s more solid effect for the framing lines. Fortunately, I have both practice with the stitch plus Amy Mitten’s excellent flip book on executing Montenegrin, covering all possible directional angles, so the transitions in this design will be easy, even upside down.
Now off to chart, and once the main motifs are captured, figure out how to compose them into a viable “small snapshot” piece on my 19 x 27 inch (48.26 x 68.58 cm) cut of linen.
CONTINUING EXPERIMENTS
The Grand Experiment of splitting the individual plies of my vintage six-ply Pearsall’s silk floss into component strands continues. So far it has worked out. I’ve only lost one of the separated strands, and that was to it catching on something after I had unwound it, but before I restored some twist by finger spinning, and a very light application of beeswax to set the new spin.
I’m liking the look of the separated strands. Very much a historical look, with the long staple fibers being shown to advantage, and the occasional thick-thin variance of the finger-spun strands. Note that in the photo below in the salmon thread you can see the kink set by the original spinning, but that the kinky texture is not evident at all in the stitched diamond filling. A win.
Too bad the Pearsall’s is such a discontinued unicorn. I don’t think I could do this with Au Ver a Soie’s Soie D’Alger. The staple isn’t as long, and the twist is both different and tighter.
One thing I did to eke out my colors was to work with two at the same time, alternating color stitches on the baselines, and working sprigs and inner ornaments in one color or the other. I hadn’t tried this parlor trick before.
You can see at the bottom of the motto rectangle that I hop-scotched the two colors – working one a bit along, then filling in the other. There are also TWO baselines in this strip due to the use of two colors. One handles the edge along the diamond infilling, plus the alternating squares-and-diagonals inside the border strip, and the other handles the top line and alternating sprigs. That’s because logic prevents doing the top and bottom edge PLUS the sprigs in two colors off of one baseline. In alternating colors you have to keep going forward along a line unless you want it to be solidly one color or the other. I could do the single color wreath sprigs easily, but those three stitches between them (or between the bottom legs of the squared diagonal boxes) would also have to be a single color because they would require doubling back to fill. Therefore, two baselines. Not a problem, and pretty easy to parse for quick stitching, once I realized the problem and stopped stitching myself into cul de sacs.
Except for the dark outlines of the letters, all of the stitching so far has been done with the split strand Pearsall’s. And I intend to continue working that way for the rest of the project, because of the look, my need to stretch my very limited quantities, and the challenge of doing something new and unexpected.
The next design will be one I’ve done quite recently, but worked up a bit differently. I did this Tolkein-sketch-inspired strip on the sampler I did in tribute to the Resident Male’s novel Treyavir. I worked the outlines in navy blue, and then went back and filled in selected areas of the design with squared filling, in a deep gold-tone yellow.
This time I’ve added a corner (very easy to do because of the clear diagonal elements). I’m plotting out a way to do it in multicolor because I don’t really have enough of any one (or two) colors to ensure that I can stitch the entire thing all the way around as a full frame. And I certainly don’t have enough of any one color to do a fill treatment as I did before. Doing multicolor will be problematic because of the design itself, too. The long diagonals “cap” the petal like elements. Possibilities include:
- Skipping over the end cap petal stitches and using a separate color for the top and bottom lines, and to work any stitches between petal caps on the diagonal. All petal elements will be entire, with no truncated end caps.
- Dividing my colors into two groups – possibly cool (blues, greens, purples) and warms (oranges, salmons, tan – no true reds in the pile to speak of). Working triangles in one direction in cools, in succession, alternating with warms, BUT letting the cool color triangle edges dominate, letting the warmer colors recede.
- Working the top and bottom baselines and hard diagonals in the same color throughout (possibly two very close shades of the same color, alternating stitches), then filling in the rest of the triangle patterning in alternating warm and cool colors. All cap stitches will be done in the outline colors.
- Some variant of 1, 2 or 3, with the smaller center triangles being worked in a different tone or possibly even the opposite color group from the larger, outer triangles.
Now to finish off the salmon diamond fill behind the letters, plus the remaining bits of the wreath sprig two-tone edging on that box. Then on to the outer frame.
Also, I will write more on two-tone double running history in the next post (with special acknowledgement to the ever generous Melinda Sherbring who shared copious notes and examples with me) – but I can only sit for so long at a time, and that’s an entire saga all on its own.
AND SO WE BEGIN AGAIN…
Never will I be someone who has a long hiatus between projects. Aside from the fact that I always have several concurrent ones, the final phases of any project are usually fueled by advance planning for the next one.
As I mentioned in the last post, I was prepping the ground for RELENTLESS FORWARD PROGRESS, the piece I am doing as a thank-you for the therapy and nursing staff at Vanderbilt Rehab/Newport Hospital. I’ve finished the truing, decided on a size, hemmed all the way around, and basted my centers and edge borders. I also completed the atypical (for me) task of plotting out 90% of the chart for the entire piece, and started in on the stitching:
I did the extreme layout because I wanted to center the motto properly, inside a surround that used as little fudging as possible. This meant working up corners, and making sure the repeat count was congruent with my usage, and with the available space. Oh, and the lettering. I didn’t find a vintage alphabet with the right flavor, so I decided to make the piece rather abstract, with a quasi-futuristic typeface, instead. I went looking for Just The Right Thing, and didn’t find it among charted alphabets, either. So I drafted up my own. Taking four or five different vaguely science-fiction-movie style typefaces, I rammed them together and drew up my own outline-only interpretation. Before you ask, I don’t have the whole alphabet – only the letters I needed for the motto. But except for an H and I, I have all of the top ten letters from the frequency table, and those two are easy extrapolations.
As the photo above shows, I’ve matched up the center of my chart with the center of my cloth, and started in on the stitching. If you look reaaalllly closely you will see the pink basting threads marking my center lines. And even just starting out I am loving the Pearsall’s. Smooth, sleek, easy to stitch – a dream to work with.
My intent is to do a narrow inner frame around the lettering. Inside that frame I will do very open voiding, possibly just diamonds in a complementary but lighter color. I might experiment with the Pearsall’s 6 ply floss. Each of the separable standard plies is clearly made up of two constituent strands. The silk itself is quite long staple and very strong. I may try to separate a standard ply and work those background diamonds with just one of those strands – what is in effect a half-ply of silk. That would stretch my limited supply, and keep the lettering in front as prominent as possible. Stay tuned for that experiment. I’m not there yet, and have to finish the motto first.
As for my continuing rehab from surgery – I am still improving. Every day a bit stronger and more capable. I can walk further, sit longer, and do far more things on my own than I could in May when I came home. At the end of this month I will start a program of Proton Beam Radiation aimed at eliminating any last possible but otherwise undetectable cancer precursor cells; to knock the chance of recolonization way down. It will run through October and be a daily appointment, Monday through Friday. An inconvenience for sure, but anything that tips the odds even more in my favor is most welcome. In the mean time, my job is to get as strong and as fit as possible prior to radiation commencement. I am taking that job VERY seriously.
JOYOUS ENDING
I’ve finished the latest piece – the sampler in tribute to the Resident Male’s nascent book Forlorn Toys. He is still writing it, so I won’t give spoilers beyond what I have already cited: the motto, the very obvious panel of aforesaid toys, my attempt at spaceships, and the band with the curious feathery rabbit like creatures.
All in all, I am quite pleased with it. Joy now goes to join my Wall of Shame – the place where my completed but as yet unframed/not-ready-for-public-display pieces live side by side with my unfinished projects. As you know this one like so many others is stitched on reclaimed household linen. I did not notice a bleach-weakened bit along a patch of the edging at the lower left. When that was hooped over and tension applied, the neatly done hem stitching failed, leaving a hole. I will eventually mend that, but other priorities assert themselves.
First among those priorities is a piece I promised to the community of therapists and nurses that tended to me at Vanderbilt Rehab Center at Newport Hospital. It’s fueled by a gift of silk floss from Occupational Therapist Abbey. She admired the work I brought with me intending to stitch. She had an inherited stash of silk threads but no use for it, and asked if I would like it. Always happy to have such things, I agreed, and she sent me a wonderous assortment of Pearsall’s silk floss – long discontinued – in jewel tones.
A princely gift, indeed. And only fitting that I use it for a gift back to the caregivers who got me back on my feet and moving again.
I’ve selected a tinted linen to use as ground for this one. I am not sure who gave me this because I didn’t put a note into the package (possibly my spawn, so apologies if it was). It’s custom dyed Zwiegart 36 count linen (big as logs for me), from Hollis Hands Create – a frosty barely blue tint called Silver Moon.
The first step is to begin the design of the motto. In this case “RELENTLESS FORWARD PROGRESS,” furnished by the Vanderbilt Physical Therapy team. Done. And then to begin thinking about how the rest of the piece will be worked. Not a band sampler this time, it will be a “framed” piece, with one or more bands of design running around all four sides of the motto, complete with corners and any improvisations to make the bands’ designs work out correctly with minimal fudging. Therefore I will be doing a some on-screen work to prepare for this one. More than I would have needed had this been a simple band sampler. For example, those corners will have to be drafted out even if I chose band designs I’ve previously devised. And I will have to plan to use multiple colors effectively because while there are many hues in my bag of silks, there are no duplicates, and most of the skeins are partials. It will be fun to figure out how best to use my limited quantity treasures.
And then there’s selecting a size for the piece and preparing my ground. For that the first bit is to true the edges of the linen cut. To do that I find and pull the warp or weft thread at the narrowest point of the cut, withdrawing it entirely from narrow end across to the widest end. This gives me a clean line along which to cut, and ensures that my edges are parallel. On this piece of ground with one selvedge edge, you can see that the left and right sides perpendicular to the selvedge each are slightly skew, one by about an inch, and the other by about 3/4 of an inch.
Note that regardless of the retail source, or whether or not the edges are serged or otherwise finished, if I buy a cross bolt full width cut or a fat quarter I always inspect the edges and true them in this manner. I have yet to receive any cut that was done completely congruent with weave direction. Sometimes the deviation is minimal, and there is only an inch or so lost all the way around. Sometimes, especially with lower price precuts sold in big box crafts stores, up to four inches can be wasted all the way around
This is why if you purchase pre-cut yardage, even if you have added on extra width to allow for easy hoop use and framing, it doesn’t hurt to add an additional inch or two all the way around. You never know when you will get a cut so skew that after the cloth is trued parallel to the weave, the cloth ends up being much smaller than you thought you were buying. Charles Craft prepackaged cotton and cotton blend evenweave was notorious for skew cuts. Their products started me doing this “proofing” step, and I have not regretted it since.
I won’t be using this entire fat quarter on this project. I will measure my ground cloth piece after it’s cut and the left and right edges are hemmed. I’ll decide then on the orientation of my sampler, cut my ground accordingly (also on a pulled thread line), and hem that last edge. The remaining bit will be returned to stash. And I will get a start on selecting my framing pattern(s) and drafting up my new corners.
On the non-computer work side, while the design work is going on but after I get my piece of cloth sized and hemmed, I will baste in guidelines: centers and stitching area edges. The final count of the available stitching real estate between the area edge marks will help inform final design tweaks.
I don’t think of all this pre-work as being very complex or onerous. The physical prep is mostly mindless and gives me plenty of headspace for the rest of the planning.
Now off to select my patterns… I toyed with using icons representing progress from sitting to walking, but I decided that was too limiting. The rehab therapies offered go far beyond simple sit to stand to walk, and I wanted the piece to be as inclusive (or non-specific) as possible. And the logos for the various institutions and professional certifications involved are too fussy to be easily charted at my scale. So it’s a mix of florals, geometrics, and possibly a pet or mythical beast or two thrown in. After all, who doesn’t identify with dragons or kittens?
PLAYING WITH TOYS
As I mentioned before, there’s no point in honoring a book called Forlorn Toys without showing some of the toys. So I drafted up a representative sample.
I’m still filling in the background stars, but that should not take long. Then another plain band of long armed cross stitch, and selecting the first of what will probably be the last two strips on this piece. The final touch will be to revisit the motto section, adding themed elements left and right of the lettering, and perhaps jazzing up JOY a bit so that it doesn’t look so pitiful against the darker typeface used for the rest of the lettering.
As to the remaining strips – I’m actually running out of material. I either have to spend more time drawing, or stitch slower. But in the interim I have decided that designs used on pieces I have given away, never to be seen again are now fair game for repetition. So if you see something that piques a sense of deja vu, you are exactly correct. Done before, but not precisely in this way. An old friend returning for a repeat visit.
After this one on to the next. No clue yet as to what that might be. I have a couple of outstanding promises in queue. Possibly one of those. And those teddy bears… I may doodle up a couple of strip variations featuring just them, for folk who want to do up birth commemoration samplers, or bibs and toddler clothing trims for particularly favored children. Provided there is interest, of course.
OFF AND RUNNING!
On the ground, it’s more like walking slowly getting used to the transition from walker to cane, but in stitching, we’re galloping. Here is progress since the last post.
Several strips so far, a combo of reach-backs to my older books, and to the more recent Ensamplario Atlantio Volume III. I am still drafting up the custom bands that are specific references to the content of Forlorn Toys, the book that The Resident Male is writing right now. When you see them you will realize what’s taking so long (other than limits on how long I can stand at the computer in a day).
I do have to report an oops. One that dates back to the publication of The New Carolingian Modelbook in 1995. I hadn’t stitched the current strip before, mostly for reasons of size. It’s quite tall. But this being a very long piece of cloth, I thought it would work well on this piece. Lo and behold. There is a small crossings error in the original. It’s small enough to be an easy fix, but I will put redoing that page in queue and eventually publish it in here, and on the errata section on the “My Books” tab elsewhere on this site.
In the mean time I’m at the point in this complex interlace that I can go off-book. I’m just copying what I’ve stitched to date now, flipping/mirroring/inverting the crosses as required. Yes, it’s an eye-bender, but each subsection is logical, and if I keep the precision up so that all of the subsections meet up nicely, no where near as difficult as it looks.
ASSIST FINISH AND TOYS KICK-OFF
At long last, ASSIST is complete. It still needs to be ironed and framed or otherwise prepared for display, but the stitching is done.
The tumbled columns on the top are there because my life was pretty much tossed around the time I started that strip. I had just gotten the chordoma diagnosis, and was racing to get as much done as possible. At the same time I was working on an early release for Ensamplario Atlantio III, and the Epic Fandom Stitch-Along compilation. I ended up not completing ASSIST, opting to leave it unfinished, that I would get back to it as a sign of hope. Well, slowly over the past two weeks, I’ve made steady progress. I trained myself to recline at an angle. That freed 1.5 hands for embroidery employment, and with practice my speed increased.
But now on to the next one. The Resident Male is working on another book (his 7th counting both published and as yet unpublished works), and I having marked the presence of most of the others, I need to welcome Forlorn Toys, too.
Again I pull out a battle-weary rescued bit of linen, yet another thrift store find. Yes, it has some flaws and stains. I don’t care (the title after all is Forlorn Toys). Most of that will be overstitched and very difficult to see. It happens that this piece is the longest yet, with the entire cloth (stitchable area plus margins) being 12 X 35 inches. And it sports nifty hand-done bits of Italian hemming done all the way around it. I’m leaving those intact. (Excuse the sickbed photo, I’m doing the best I can).
My penny method gives me a thread count of 37×39 threads per inch. Although this hemstitched cloth was done with a less than 100% adherence to accuracy have set my margins averaging out discrepancies, leaving a stitching area of 9.25 inches. That means that that after the margins are removed, the stitching area will accommodate roughly 171 stitches across ([smaller thread count x width/2]).
Armed with that info I can begin thumbing through my favorite reference site looking for a typeface in which the longest part of this one’s motto will fit. Minor complication here – GIMP, my workhorse solution for dash and dot pattern drafting is not working well with my templates since yesterday’s update. I will eventually get that sorted, but it will take a bit of effort. If you or someone you know is a GIMP Wizard with a little time to spare, please let me know.
In the mean time I am well into the first band (an edge accompaniment from T2CM Plate 25), although the final style for the Toys sampler has not yet been set. All I can say is that it will be worked in green DMC #890 cotton, and mostly in linear stitching. Nice view of the hem stitching here, too.
Onward and upward. As my Resident Male has written before, Stone by Stone.
EPIC FANDOM STITCH-ALONG NEWS
Just a quick post to let folk know that the Epic Fandom Stitch-Along from several years ago is still free, and available for download here at String-or-Nothing. AND I’ve made it much easier to do so.
I have consolidated all of the individual week by week releases along with the general info provided before the project began into a single 50-page PDF document. No more hunting for the single page you need in a forest of other pages! It’s now on the My Books tab, and I’ve added a link to the top of the SAL tab, as well.
Or you can click here to hop directly to the PDF.
As ever, enjoy! I do hope some folk are brave enough to try this one. And like always, nothing brings me more joy than seeing the pattern children out at play. Do the whole SAL, cherry pick the panel you want to do.
Same restrictions as my other offerings – personal use only, and please respect my copyright. Other than that, have fun. 🙂
String-Or-Nothing 
