Kicking off Week One of my WIPGO year is The Colonial Sampler by Betsy Stinner. I adopted this project from the stash of my friend Sandy after she passed in 2017. I know that Sandy attended the class held by Betsy, but I don’t know when it was. The pattern does not have a copyright date printed in it.
Sandy either completed or reused the fabric for the small pillow class teaching piece in the bottom right corner, as that fabric was missing. She never started the full sampler. The entire kit was together. I was happy to take it as a piece to remember her by as I stitch.
It’s a fun sampler with a variety of bands in different stitches – cross stitch, four-sided stitch, back stitches, herringbone, satin stitch, three-sided Italian cross, darning patterns, smyrna crosses, Greek stitch, queen stitches, etc. The flosses are all silks – a mix of Soie d’Alger and Silk ‘N’ Colors. It’s stitched on 32 ct Raw linen from Zweigart and measures 107w x 189h. This is what I’d would consider a medium-sized piece.
I began my version on New Year’s Eve 2021 as part of the #nye12x12 stitchalong held via Instagram. It really hasn’t seen any work since January of last year, though. I started on the top band, but massively screwed up my counting – so abandoned the original start down in a corner of the fabric (until I feel like frogging it out), and instead decided to start dead in the middle to ensure I had things counted correctly. I can’t remember what I did wrong on the original – but I clearly was annoyed enough to just jump on the fabric! That’s not a common thing for me to do.
The Finnegan’s Fog silk, which is that blue to grey dye down the sides is a color I just loooooooooove. It stitches so pretty and just has this mysterious look to it. My photograph has a dark line in the center under the green – but that’s just a shadow, not stitches.
My plan for this WIPGO is to fill in that center band (“Band 11”) with the called-for satin and smyrna stitches. It’s not a particularly complicated band, but will be a very pretty starting point to make some nice progress.
More coming later this week!