One step forward, two steps back

 I had a class today on the Elizabethan Rose, and we worked on couching gold threads on the frame, and started attaching silk gimp to the stem of the flower.

There will be a lot more gold stitched on the frame before our next class, and we'll add more rows to the stem.

And here is Ann Kemp.

I have not mixed up before-and-after pictures. This is how Ann looked after I discovered that I had miscounted the first stem I stitched. The very first stem. The one that all the other stems were counted from. 

When I mentioned that I have a black thumb when it comes to gardening, I really didn't mean my stitched gardening as well.

Foliage

 I've been stitching foliage the last couple of days. This is the only way I will have foliage since I have a black thumb. I would love to grow flowers and have a vegetable garden, but apparently I do not have the gift. Dearly Beloved does, so he gets that activity in the division of labor.

However, I now have stripey leaves on the Elizabethan Rose project I'm taking from Zina Kazban.

They will have all sorts of embellishment before it's all over, but this is the start.

And there is foliage on Ann Kemp's sampler:

So now I'm adding flowers to those branches and leaves. 

I really wish I knew more about Ann Kemp. She has some motifs on her sampler that are textbook perfect, like her pinkes and the apple baskets. But then she has a wild group of vines and leaves and flowers that twine and twist and flourish all around the handle of the basket. I'd love to know what her embroidery teacher thought about this--did she encourage her or did she shake her head and sigh? I guess we'll never know.

I am enjoying stitching after a couple of days of feeling like a zombie. I never felt ill--but I really was sleepy, as in sitting up straight with a needle in my hand, sound asleep. This is my usual reaction to the Covid shot, but I think having the flu shot on top of it multiplied the effects. Anyway, now I can sit up straight with a needle in my hand and actually stitch. 

Progress Report

 Well, I got one more band on The Queen Sampler all but stitched. The grapes are supposed to be filled with spiral trellis stitch. I have to work spiral trellis in hand so I can keep tension on the knot--mainly because I haven't figured out quite how to do that when I have the fabric on a scroll frame. So, I guess when the rest of the sampler is stitched, I'll take it off the scroll frame and fill in those stitches.

Actually, I kind of like the lacy look of this band . . . 

Hmmm . . . 

Not much else has happened in the last few days.

I spent half an hour one morning earlier this week looking for my clip-on magnifiers so I could stitch. They were clipped to my glasses. I was wearing my glasses.

I decided that wasn't going to be a good stitching day.

Then I got both flu and Covid shots yesterday. As my father used to say when he didn't feel quite right,  I was about half a bubble off plumb the rest of the day.

Today I'm up and I've taken my walk, and you would think I would be mostly alert--but I'm seriously thinking about going back to bed. I am retired, after all. I can do what I want when I want to do it, within reason.

Another hmmmmm . . . . . 

More or Less

 I said that my work on The Queen Sampler was going to be more or less reversible.

Lately, I think it may be less rather than more. I have found that there isn't a really good chart showing how to work a diagonal double running stitch (which all my other sources call a long-arm cross stitch) when it travels from upper left to lower right. Darlene has charts, but they don't match the configuration of this particular application--like the diagrams showing the diagonal moving from lower left to upper right are worked over six threads, but the ones showing the opposite are worked over four. Hmmmm . . . 

And I pulled every single stitch dictionary I own off my shelf and googled. I pulled out the graph paper and tried to figure it out myself. I stitched and ripped until I was worried about the linen holding up--all for the two center lines on the vine. I finally decided life is too short to worry about my backside and got it filled in somehow, but not completely reversibly.

However, the front looks okay. I'm actually ahead of where I need to be for this month's assignment.

And, as I keep reminding myself, Perfection gets in the way of Good Enough.

Wee bit of stitching

 When you have a stitching blog and you don't stitch for several days, you don't have much to blog about.

However, I finally found my mojo last night and stitched a basket of apples, or bowl of flowers, or whatever this motif is that is found on so many traditional schoolgirl samplers.

However, please notice that this one features something different. It's a hanging basket. There's a chain from the border below the verse and the top of the basket. I've never seen this motif treated quite this way before. 

Little Ann Kemp is still having fun with her sampler! Which means that I am, too.

And there was much rejoicing!

I told myself yesterday that I was not going to stop until I had all the lettering on Carmen done.

My body had other ideas, and told me I had to cease and desist if I ever wanted to straighten up again. So I went to bed and unkinked my back and finished the lettering today.

 I wish I knew what the inscription at the bottom says--it's something about Joaquin and Austria and the house of Dona Carmen Canoba, but that's all I got. Despite what the school counselors told us when we filled out our schedules, years of Latin do not help you with Romance languages, other than a word here or there.

I'm definitely going to work with more brightly color silks for a bit. I need something to liven up my life!

Deadly Dull and Boring

Just more letters today--but I'm over the halfway point!

I'm going to try to finish the letters tomorrow, and then move on to something less alphabet-y and more colorful.

After all, you have to choke down the cauliflower before you get the creme brûlée.

Numbers and Letters, Oh My!

I do not like stitching letters. Or numbers. But that is what I've done today.

The verse on Ann Kemp is finally complete. I didn't think that was ever going to happen.

 And I'm working on the letters and numbers on Carmen's central cartouche. I had to stop tonight because my eyes were tired of stitching off-white letters on off-white fabric--46 count fabric at that. It will be beautiful when it's done. And I really hope it's done in the next day or so.

I have a friend who loves, loves, LOVES stitching Bristol samplers. She keeps telling me that letters are just motifs and if I treat them that way, I'll enjoy doing them.

Nope. I can delude myself about a lot of things when it comes to needlework, but this isn't one of them.

And then I heard someone talking about the reason she always works her samplers from the bottom up. The fun stuff is the bottom, so if you start there, you start with the fun stuff. Then you have the boring stuff like alphabets at the top.

If I stitched from bottom up, the top would never be done.

This is most definitely a first world problem, but the fact remains, I strongly dislike stitching alphabets.

Silks and precious metals

 I have projects that involve silks and metal threads that I want to work on, too.

Can we say wretched excess? Can we say "biting off more than we can chew?"

So, what else is new . . .story of my stitching life . . . 

Of course, I want to finish the Cherished Lettercase. That you've seen, probably more than you want.

Then I started a new class with Zina today, her Elizabethan Rose. This is what I stitched in class.

As I have previously noted, I don't stitch well in class, but I did get most of a stripey leaf and the body of the beetle done. There are a lot of stripey leaves to stitch plus the beginning of the frame before class three weeks from now.

The first class for Tricia Nguyen's Pincushions of Nuremberg was posted. Look at those luscious silks! I gotta find a scroll frame and get the linen mounted for that so I can stick a needle in it.

I belong to the Dayton chapter of EGA, and they sponsor a Special Interest Group in goldwork. This design showed up in Inspirations magazine's last issue, and a bunch of us wanted to stitch it--so it's going to be our ongoing project (along with others) for awhile. I need to transfer the design to the fabric, get it mounted, and do the padding before our next meeting.

And then there's my hummingbird that I was working on about this time last year. I got all the silk done but haven't gilded the bird. I'd like to have that finished since I signed up for another class with the designer, scheduled to start in October. I suppose I should add the hummingbird to my list.

Okay, we just went all the way from ridiculously optimistic to Fantasy Land. Stop me before I add anything else!

Samplers in September

 One of my stitching buddies told me I needed to have before and after pictures for my September samplers.

So here they are:

Carmen has a central cartouche filled with letters, numbers, and words. I would love to have all of them stitched by the end of September. I also wanted to have them all stitched by the end of July. And then by the end of August. We'll see if September is the charm--it will be the third time I've made the attempt, after all.

Darlene O'Steen's Queen Sampler is this year's (and next year's as well) SAL. To stay current, I have to fill in the center of the vine. Being contrary, I've done some other stuff but haven't done any more stitches in the vine. I need to do that in the next couple of weeks before our next SAL meeting.

A Fancy Basket Ann Kemp 1815 is my almost-all-cross-stitch project for those times when I need to stitch but need to do nothing more than count. Progress on this will be determined by how much easy stitching I need.

And I may need a good bit. September is shaping up to be a silk/silk-&-metal thread month as well as a sampler month. I'll show you that tomorrow.

Sweet September

It always seems like the new year should start with September. 

So far, mine has not been promising. I have six new mosquito bites. The printer isn't talking to the laptop and we can't figure out why. We fed it two new ink cartridges and installed them correctly, but apparently that threw something else off. (BDE says that printers are possessed by demons and we should get an exorcist.) I haven't been able to thread a needle today due to various and sundry domestic issues. Dearly Beloved has been stomping around in a snit for some unknown reason--I think he needs a nap.

Actually, maybe I need one, too.

Anyway, I got to the very last bit of Cherished and hit a wall yesterday. I just could not make myself stitch the final border. But here is where it is at the moment.

As it is Sampler September, I seriously considered started a new sampler. However, at the moment, I have three I'm actively working on plus probably a dozen more UFO's. I don't think I need to start yet another one.

So, I believe I will continue to work on Carmen and The Queen Sampler and Ann Kemp in September.

And have an exorcist remove the demons from the printer.