Just a heads up if you’re trying to reach me – my MacBook decided it wanted to throw me for a loop, and for some reason it won’t reboot. Since I have cash tied up in other commitments, I’m sharing a computer with my husband for a few weeks until I can get it fixed. So please be patient if you email me, etc – I’ll get to responses as I can from my cell phone.
As I mentioned in my TUSAL update last night – I’ve had a good month of stitching. So far this month I’ve touched four projects and made good progress on them. I posted my updates on Inn at Fox Run Mill on my WIPocalypse post earlier this month. Since then, I’ve been working steadily on Book of Ink Circles (BoInk) and Floral Bellpull.
Book of Ink Circles was honestly only supposed to be my focus for a couple of days, starting with Jury Duty on the 9th and going through that weekend. I figured I’d get a couple border lines done and be happy with it, but it just stayed in my work bag, and I’ve been plugging away at lines on it on my train commute ever since. On Friday I finally got the sense that I needed to move on, and it got one final night yesterday on the train ride home before being photographed and put away for a couple weeks. The photo to the left is the result of my work this month. I’m very pleased. I’ve managed to get roughly a third of the edging of all of the squares done, and I’m finding it much easier and faster as I progress because I have reference points for all of the squares(less double-check counting, more stitching). I’m hoping that next month I can finish the edging. Once that’s done, my progress will go much faster for a while because I’ll just be filling in the actual border before moving onto the individual square patterns.
My color scheme for BoInk is a bit of a work in progress. My goal is to have it entirely in autumn tones because I find the original just a little too gaudy for my personal tastes (even if the gaudy is probably more historically authentic), but when I pulled colors at Celebration last year, I somehow managed to pull just about the same colors as it called for. So I have a few more swap-outs to do. I’m doing the edge work in Crescent Color’s “Cinders,” so it’s all a very deep reddish-brown with occasional pops of bright red along the border.
Floral Bellpull is progressing a little slower than I hoped, purely due to me having to pull out the leaves – twice – on the border for square #5. The chart’s to blame on this one, to be honest. The colors are backward of what they really should be. On the chart, the satin stitches that build the leaves in the borders are indicated by grey lines, but not in a logical sense. The lighter grey lines were used to indicate the darker greens, and vice versa. My brain of course sees darker lines = darker colors, and that’s what’s been stitched… for four of six squares. I’m not picking out every border, especially over something that’s completely arbitrary in the scheme of things. Once I figured out what the heck I’d been doing, it was easy to correct to what had been done in the squares before it and get the darker set of leaves done. Tonight I’ll curl up and finish the lighter leaves, the purple flowers, and hopefully the vines. And then I’ll have reached my goal on Floral Bellpull for the month.
I still have backstitching to do on square #4, and on inspection as I moved the piece on my scroll bars, there’s still a little to do on square #3, too. I’m planning on bringing it to Stitcher’s Hideaway with me next weekend. It’s a perfect opportunity to do the backstitching and chat away, making the whole thing less painful, and hey… I’ll get a mini-finish out of the weekend!
The new project for me for my commutes this week is the scissor fob I’m doing for the exchange at Hideaway. I think I may be making my fob a little bigger than most (it’s going to end up around 3 x 3 inches, give or take a little), but I also have the habit of misplacing my scissors, so I’d find a larger fob to be more practical. I found a lovely tonal bluework piece in one of my magazines that reminds me of our Spode dishes a bit. It’s a bit more generic in style, so I think it’s more appropriate and hopefully easier to appeal to the recipient for the blind yankee swap style draw (take a number, pick a bag in number order) we’re having for the exchange.
I’ll post the finished project late next weekend once the exchange is over (and once the piece is stitched!)
Happy stitching all!
Quite excited!
