You say obsessed, I say FINISHED!!!

For the last week, I've come home from work, gulped down dinner, plopped into the wing chair, and threaded a needle.

And Mary Atwood is finished!

And here is the last band!

I tried to get Dearly Beloved to hold the sampler up so I could get a full picture, but he was afraid his bony ankles would be in the picture and he didn't want that on the innerwebs.  So here it is in sections:

Top

Middle

Bottom

The last band nearly did me in. Mary didn't worry too much about symmetry, so the petals of each flower don't match their partners and the two flowers don't match each other. So that meant I had to watch every single stitch to make sure I was reproducing as closely as possible as well as keep the reversibility.

And you'll notice the blue band on the very bottom doesn't go all the way across. I can't decide if Mary ran out of steam or ran out of thread. I am going to assume that she ran out of thread. Silk thread was not likely to be a very high priority in the colonies in the 1600's.  Or maybe the dye lots didn't match. Or maybe she decided she was done, done, done and could not stitch another stitch.

It has been suggested that I work on another reversible sampler while my head and hands are familiar with the stitches. My head and hands have decided they want to do something that requires nothing more than the ability to count (and that is sometimes not a given for me), so I'm going to work on a very different kind of sampler this week-end.