WIPGO 2023 – Week 16 – Live on Little

For the past two years, I’ve been attending a stitching retreat in Troy, New Hampshire at The Inn at East Hill Farm. It’s held the first weekend of November – so past peak for the autumn color, but still early enough in the crossover to winter that the weather shouldn’t be too iffy. The farm is honestly just perfect – completely isolated with bad cell service that forces us to unplug for the weekend. Home cooked meals, beautiful scenery, lots of animals to visit on the property – including fresh eggs to bring home right from the coop. Both years as I’ve left, my reaction has just been “OMG, this was exactly what I needed.” And I totally want to just book a couple days there to get away and relax on my own!

This past year, several attendees decided to start on Live on Little by Plum Street Samplers as an ongoing SAL for a personal keepsake of the retreat.

It’s a perfect New England-ey sampler, although East Hill Farm is not by the sea. It’s also a very involved sampler. Tons of stitches, lots of solid stitching. And there are a bunch of color changes to show the bricks in that house! It has a hidden secret, though – it’s a fabulous piece to bring to retreats. There is a ton of fill-in stitching to do that, if set up properly at home, will allow for easy stitching while chatting with others at the farm table with almost minimal counting.

Quite a few of us were debating changing the verse on it. I was among those at the retreat, although I admit that it’s growing on me… so I may just stitch it as charted. I have plenty of time to decide. This piece will be with me for a long time!

The above progress is what I started at the farm last November. It was a decent start for a few hours of stitching before the light waned and I needed to switch to a project with larger crosses. I noticed as I was returning on that white line of the roof that I’d screwed up my stitches somewhere and not crossed over two. Since I’m so early in the stitching, my first order of business for April WIPGO will be to fix that row. This piece is just too big for me to have a counting error like that and leave it so early. After that, I’m planning on continuing down with the brickwork of the house for a bit just to get the width of the house correct. By the time The Farm comes around in November, I’ll have the framing the top of the house so I can focus on filling in roofing during the retreat.

This is definitely going to be a slow-progress piece, and truthfully I count on it being one of those pieces I bring out at each retreat just to work on for a bit for fill-in. It’ll be a nice little memorial to time spent away stitching with friends.