Just posted my Rectangles to http://www.flickr.com/groups/needlenthread/pool/
I hope they are of appropriate skill level to someone who spent 1 year doing two big Trish Burr long and short stitch projects!!!! (Bunch of Poppies and Rust Red Iris)
Yesterday I felt better and spent the whole day stitching!
I thought I’d put it up here to show what I’d achieved. Gods know when I’ll be able to finish, and be able to put the finished rectangles up on the official Flickr folder Mary has set up for us to show our work. I wanted to show this interim step because it’s been so long since I’ve posted anything I’ve done.
I’m rapt.
The colour palette is slightly different (3/4 of my second hand DMC aren’t numbered, and I wasn’t that fussed anyway. I started off using the DMC colour chart to match to the colour numbers, but then I got a bit distracted) but it does mean that I’ve managed to pick the last two colours that are slightly too similiar (seen in the first small triangle bottom).
I’m doing it on an old serviette I found in my vintage linen stash. It has a buttonholed scallop edging, and a small tulip already embroidered in white stem stitch in one corner. (I wonder where it came from? What it’s history is? Did a member of my family embroider it?)
One thing that has been occupying my mind is whether to leave the objects ‘free floating’ or to add in lines (like a chessboard) between them (as Mary has actually drawn them on the paper exercise sheet) – some pretty line stitch, or a mixture of line stitches.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about in any of this, refer to http://www.needlenthread.com/2009/08/long-and-short-stitch-lessons-index.html
Mary was talking today at her site about how she is going to be spending several weeks teaching us a sampler of various long and short stitch shapes :
http://www.needlenthread.com/2009/07/long-and-short-stitch-shading-my.html,
including the use of a couple of videos.
The sampler :
She's specifically designed the shapes to cover difficult aspects of L&S. (I think that blue shape at the top right will be the hardest)
When I'm feeling better, (a month or so?) I'll do the sampler (the lessons should have started by then) before getting back to my own Elizabethan Sampler.
It's far too good an opportunity to miss learning directly from someone who really knows their Long and Short Stitch.