Stitching Update and Overdue Stash Haul Photos

I started Hinzeit’s Brush Em a couple of weeks ago, realizing that it needs to be done and framed sooner than the Heirloom Memories Sampler. Besides, with the odd ways I’ve been feeling lately physically, I thought it might be better to work on something that doesn’t take much concentration. At this point, I’m more than 50% done:

Photo removed. See the finished piece here.

I can’t manage to get a decent photo, for some reason. I’ve used my floor lamp and a flash, but neither illuminates the piece well, especially when you consider that it’s stitched on white fabric. Maybe next time I will try laying the piece against a white background, instead of the dark blue of the sofa.

In other news, I went to Fireside Stitchery in Frazier with a friend on the 9th. Bonnie was nice enough to drive up from the DC area to spend time with me and I enjoyed myself thoroughly. Bonnie has the patience of a saint, considering it took me hours to do a color conversion on a single counted canvas design. I may be good at changing colors in cross stitch designs, but with all of the manufacturers and types of fibers available for counted canvas work, it’s much, much more challenging! Add that to the fact that some of the colors were out of stock, especially right in the ranges I was looking at, and I’m not 100% sure what we pulled together will work. Only time will tell. Fortunately, Fireside is less than an hour away, so I can go back if things don’t look right once I get started stitching.

Since I’ve never done counted canvas work, I needed everything. I chose to start with a design from Deb Bee’s Designs since Debbie was the one who starting me down this road with her wonderfully designed panel for the Lady’s Reticule project for the Savannah retreat. I went with Aquamarine from her Glitz & Glamour line. The aquamarine colorway is really quite lovely, but I decided to work with purples, instead. I was rolling along, picking fibers in a light lavender that all worked well together, until I got down to the last few fibers and ran out of luck. I tried and tried for a while, then gave up and decided to try for a deep purple conversion instead. That was even harder, so I switched back to the lavender after a somewhat brief and feeble attempt.

Here’s what Bonnie helped to decide on, after I got stuck trying to choose an overdyed silk and a couple of solid colored silks to go with it to finish off the design:

The colors are very pale, so it’s hard to see them, even though this picture was snapped in good daylight. I think I’m going to have to adjust the white balance on my camera. I don’t think I’ll use the lilac Au Ver a Soie pictured under the skein of Waterlilies. I may not end up using the Splendor in the lower right corner, either. The remaining fibers work together fairly well, even though the sheen of the Fyre Werks looks like it doesn’t match anything else at all. Trust me, it does. 🙂

Bonnie and I spent about the same amount of money, which was alarmingly easy to do. And, of course, the store doesn’t have any sort of automation to their pricing or inventory systems, so we had to wait while the owner wrote up both of our orders by hand. While we were waiting, there were two spinner displays on the counter containing lovely hand-painted charms and buttons which drew my attention. I found several that I liked and I could have easily dropped quite a bundle on them, but I limited myself in the end to just two. I will probably go back for one of the dragonfly charms because they look like the ones that Just Nan was putting out for a while. This little frog button was just too cute to pass up:

But my favorite find was this dragon, lurking underneath another dragon painted in a different set of colors:

You can see why that fellow just HAD to jump into my basket.

And finally, here’s a picture of the entire haul:

The three darker purple fibers in the top left area are a few from my attempt at the darker color conversion which were just too lovely to turn down. The tack kit that I found is awesome. The tack pusher is magnetized so that the tack heads won’t slip while I’m pushing them into the stretcher bars. Brilliant. And the canvas is what’s rolled up in the tissue paper. The last bit is the skein of Leah’s overdyed cotton floss at the very top left corner of the photo. I pulled it because I thought it would match some of the Leah’s pearl cotton that I had at home, but alas, it does not match. 🙁 For some reason, the color numbers of Leah’s floss don’t match the color numbers of their pearl cottons. Some matched, but some very obviously did not. Quite disappointing, really, but what can you do?

Now I just need a project bag for this whole design that will also fit the canvas once I mount it to the stretcher bars.

Thanks for coming up, Bonnie! I definitely needed your expertise and it was really nice to catch up with you again after Savannah. I’ll have to come down and return the favor sometime.