Twofer

Two things in one post!


The blues and greens from this month's Smalls.




Stitch Sampler I, which was posted yesterday, and Round Bargello Biscornu:
I was halfway through assembly when I realized that I had forgotten my usual flat view.

Properly speaking there isn't an actual pattern for this. I used the stitch shown in the last image here, added Rhodes stitches in the middle, half eyelets along the sides and quarter eyelets in the corners. I actually stitched both sides for this because I was having so much fun. It's the exact same pattern and colour scheme.

Title	Round Bargello Biscornu
Designer	Therapy by Thread
Start date	April 22, 2014
Finish date	April 26, 2014
Total time	9.5 hours
Fabric	28 ct unknown brown fabric
Floss	Waterlily Seaglass, Waterlily Oasis

Playing Around With Stitches

I woke up one day and wanted to stitch specialty stitches. I wasn't sure how long the yen would last and I didn't want something massive in case I lost interest.

So I designed a sampler. It was exhausting. Trying to make it interesting and getting the spacing right was frustrating. And it was just a mathematical/geometic design; nothing fancy here. I have no idea how designers do this!
I have creatively named this Stitch Sampler I and used green and white for contrast.
I made some changes while actually stitching. What looks massive on a chart actually comes out incredibly tiny on fabric, so something that looks like it's taking up a lot of space turns out not to do so. If it looks like you have too many of the same stitches it's probably still not enough.
I threw in as many specialty stitches as I could. Some I knew very well and some new. There's a lot of Rhodes variations in there.
It turns out I'm very bad at visualizing in 3D, so I have "high" stitches and "flat" stitches scattered with no rhyme or reason.
All in all, designing my own chart was an interesting experience.

Title	Stitch Sampler I
Designer	Therapy by Thread
Start date	April 16, 2014
Finish date	April 25, 2014
Total time	10 hours
Fabric	28 ct Prairie Green
Floss	DMC 3345, B5200

April SFS

I signed up for IHSW and failed horribly. I watched too much random tv and ate too much junk food and stitched about five stitches. It was a weekend best forgotten and I intend to move past it asap.

I also went on that shopping spree I've been threatening to go on. In anticipation of my birthday, which is next month, I shopped so that I would have everything ready to start on that day.

No pictures because it's all still on it's way. Hopefully it'll be here before May. Canada Post blah blah blah atrocious service blah blah blah.

Items	Cost
4 skeins DMC, 1 spool Kreinik, 25 ct black lugana 26"x26"	38.19
Ohm by AAN	24.18

Previous spending $7.26
Spending so far is $69.63
I have $30.37 banked

More about Stitch From Stash here:

April WIPocalypse

Right now Egyptian Sampler looks like this:

I don't want to jinx it by saying so, but I think I'm pretty close to a finish :)

This month's question: How do you keep your stash organized?
Since I skipped last week due to shame at the slovenly way I keep my room I thought I'd share the somewhat disorganized way I keep my stash. Almost everything takes up three drawers in a chest of drawers.


All my unused fabric is in one drawer. Everything is labelled with the size and count. Anything earmarked for a project has the project written down (because the number of times I used to get confused over why I had a particular piece of fabric cannot be counted). Little scraps that I'm convinced I'm somehow use are in a corner.

All finishes are in another drawer. This one is getting pretty full.

DMC is in five boxes. It felt like to took forever to get every colour on a bobbin but I'm so pleased that I did it. I actually have one giant set of floss that I work out of. I used to pull the colours for a particular project and keep them separately, but after I bought the same colour six times because I couldn't remember where it was I gave up and consolidated everything. Occasionally a dyelot changes and things go horrifyingly wrong, but mostly I never have to wonder where a particular floss is or whether I've cannibalized it for something.

All my books, magazine, charts and printed freebies are in a shopping bag. I keep everything by the same designer in one giant ziplog bag so they take up a little less space than if they were in individual plastic sleeves.

Everything else is in the last drawer, piled in controlled chaos.

The upper left is where I keep all non-DMC threads. The red is for my other Cirque projects, there's some anchor threads from Maia, The Shepherd's Bush thread-holder is leftover thread, there's some leftover Dimensions thread on a floss ring. Threads from the companies like Week Dye Works, Dinky Dyes etc are on their own floss ring. Next to that is my pile of ribbons. The two boxes in the bottom left contain all my Kreinik. Next to them is my tiny collection of pearl cotton.

The upper right box has all my trims.

All extra skeins of DMC are in bags corresponding to which box they would be in.

All Mill Hill beads are on floss rings in numerical order in their original packaging.

Oh and I forgot to take a picture of my WIPs, but they're all rolled up in a bag next to the bag of charts. It's a bit messy but it's organized enough for me :)

More Border

I picked up that missing DMC and it's back to the border. I also did a bit of the papyrus background in the centre panel; it was a bit annoying because I kept getting lost on which "stalk" I was on since many of them are a little different since the figures cut off parts.

Down to the Border

The pharaoh is done. I've run out of one of the yellows in the border. Montenegrin Stitch is fun. Egyptian Sampler continues to chug along.