Finished sampler with pulled-work border

My recent work trip to Virginia went well. Beautiful weather, relatively short flights, and well- defined working days left me with time in the evenings to embroider in my hotel room with no distractions. As a result, I finished the trellis, pulled-work border on my little sampler. Having never done pulled thread work before, my attempt wasn't without mishaps. For example, I finished pulling the first line of threads, secured them and cut them, only to discover the next morning that I had only pulled up to the inside edge of the vertical border. It was a little harrowing unweaving the secured threads, pulling six more and re-securing them, but I had just enough thread. After that, I pulled from each direction before securing any threads at the corners. The trellis work was challenging as well. The directions I was following weren't detailed, so I wasn't sure if the working thread stayed to the outside or the inside of the loop that hugged the groups of fabric threads. I worked it both ways and didn't see much difference, but finally decided that the working thread stays to the outside. After I finished the entire inside border, the stitching became easier and easier, until the last two sides flew by. I very much enjoyed the repetitive stitch, but I will admit to hating the pulling and securing of the threads. It probably wouldn't have been so bad on a lower stitch-count linen, but on 32 count, it was hard on the eyes. Still, I love the result and look forward to working this technique again.

 

 

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Le Geste Napolitian

During my last weekend in Rhode Island it was miraculously warmish (almost 40 degrees) and not snowing. For those of you who don't know, we got 65 inches of snow in February, which was much more manageable than Boston's 106 inches. But it was still enough to keep us caged in since the snow always came on Saturdays and Sundays. My poor husband spent several weekends shoveling snow off of roofs and hacking away at ice dams, while I got to know our grandson better. But finally, a nice weekend. So of course, we got out of the house.

This photo is from only Half way through the month!

Roger had to shovel just to get out of the house. No wonder we didn't go far from home in February.

It started with a nice lazy breakfast at a local orchard and coffee house where I finished last weekend's blog while Roger snapped my photo and did some electronic manipulation. Isn't this great?! Then it was out to a buffet lunch at an Indian restaurant in Providence, to the used bookstore at our local library, and finally up to Worcester, Massachusetts to the Worcester Art Museum--a real gem.

As we explored, I was attracted to the painting below. Le Geste Napolitian was painted in 1757 by Jean-Baptiste Grueze, a french painter in Italy. The description card said that Grueze was known for his moralistic, story-telling paintings. Unfortunately, the story, either French or Italian, that explains the action in this painting is lost, but the young woman is sending away her aristocratic lover who is dressed as a peddler. I wish I knew why! I have to take the Worcester art historian's word that her gesture is one of dismissal, although it looks hard wrought to me.

What caught my eye about this painting is peddler's wares. Do you see? His basket is full of embroidery silk, silk ribbon, and lace bobbins! What a wonderful haul. I wish I could pick through it myself. It made me itch to stitch, but I was leaving the next day, or so we thought.

Sunday I packed my bags and we headed to the airport, only to find out that my flights were cancelled. Yes, it was snowing again. But the real problem was that it was snowing in Baltimore, where my connecting flight was supposed to be. As a result, I got another whole day in New England and didn't leave until Tuesday morning. It was a long trip, with another connecting flight cancelled and my rebooked flight late, but I made it back to in Denver 12.5 hours door to door. Unfortunately, that really exhausted me, so there was not much stitching last week. And this week I go on a business trip to Virginia, so I don't expect to accomplish much for awhile. I will bring my little sampler and at least work the hem in the evenings. Cross your fingers that there will be no more cancelled flights--the weather is supposed to be good.

In the meantime, I'll daydream about the maiden and the silk peddler and think of all the wonderful things I could stitch if I had door to door floss delivery. No, mail order just isn't the same!

 

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Not quite done

Last week I thought my little sampler from Cross Stitch Antique Style Samplers (June Greenoff 2005) would be done by today. Not quite. I had a work trip to New York City in the middle of the week, which slowed my stitching. Even so, just working in the evenings while we watched tv or my husband read to me I've almost finished the cross stitching. One little bird is left to stitch, then I can do the drawn work. It is pretty simple hem, but I've just never done drawn work before so I don't want to rush through it. After that I'll mount the piece over colored fabric--maybe green so that I can use this as a Christmas decoration. What do you think?

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Resolutions

I realize that February is a little late to be making resolutions. Mine have been bubbling around in my mind for quite awhile though. When I took a short stitching staycation over Martin Luther King Day weekend I was vaguely aware of them, but they weren't actually codified. And if I don't write them down, I can't hold myself accountable. Good thing that the resolutions aren't as difficult as last year's! Basically, my idea is that after a year of stitching for others, I will take this year and stitch mostly for me. I am finally going to stitch a wedding sampler for myself and my husband (I've stitched four since we got married, all for other people); I am going to work on the First Day stumpwork pattern I got out of Inspirations; and I will try new techniques as I see fit, without any pressure to accomplish specific projects. Basically, it will be a year of play. And to balance myself, I will also expand my charity work and make at least 12 blankets for Gabriel House, as well as baptismal bibs as I am able to.

I am succeeding so far and it is fun. Over that long weekend in January, I actually started my stumpwork piece. Each of these leaves took 1.5 hours. I needed magnifiers to do this work--something I haven't needed in the past--and light. The light in my apartment is not good enough, so I went rummaging through my drawers and finally found the Beam and Read. My mother sent this to me a few Christmases ago. I read Mary Corbet's positive review of the lamp, but I had never used it. It is now my new favorite stitching tool because you can focus a very bright light easily wherever you want it and it doesn't disturb others the way a strong overhead light does. It is fantastic. I couldn't have done these leaves without it. This will be my Colorodo project because it needs great blocks of time.

I also started prepping my sampler, which is derived from Moira Blackburn's Time and Season sampler pattern. I wanted to alter the middle to hold our wedding information. I started charting it out on graph paper, but was frustrated in a few minutes, so I looked for apps to help me. I tried out a few, but Stitch Sketch was the one that worked for me. I still need to learn a lot more about the program, but it is powerful and relatively easy to use. The best part is that it converts your pattern to PDF so that you can print it easily for stitching. I did the whole pattern in one color so I can choose the colors later, but the app has the whole range of DMC colors to choose from. It is nifty

Of course, it still took me all day to chart this information, but I was able to move the motifs around and chart our our names and wedding date with much less frustration than if I had to use an eraser. While I was doing so, I also got to know the inconsistencies of the sampler pattern better. For example, the center motif is not in the exact center of the pattern. That is something that would have thrown me while stitching if I hadn't discovered it while charting.

What was less successful is that I decided to baste out 10-stitch square intervals on my fabric to help with accuracy when I stitch. I worked another 3 hours on that and I have about 1/4 of the horizontal lines done. I think that is all I will do. I can't stand the basting--especially since I need to wear magnifiers to see the 32-count fabric. This will be my Rhode Island project, but I still have to stretch it.

These will be this year's major projects, but I hope to do some small ones as well. I already have a new idea for another painted and embroidered landscape, and I am working on a little project adapted from Inspirations # 84. I should have that one done by next week.

By the end of last year, I was starting to feel uninspired. All the stitching I did for wedding, birthday, and Christmas gifts was fun, but it was also burdensome. The pressure to have things done on time got to me, even though most of the Christmas presents had been stitched the previous winter. This year, there will be no deadlines. We'll see how it works!

 

 

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A wedding sampler goes home

Last year, one of my resolution projects was to finish a wedding sampler for my husband's son and daughter-in-law. I started it in June 2012 and originally planned for it to be done that Christmas. Of course, it wasn't. I finished it last June and had it framed in July for this Christmas. Then our plans changed. Instead of being out east for Christmas, we were in Colorado. But yesterday, we finally celebrated Christmas together.

 

Roger was back home in Rhode Island, and his sons with their wives, fiancées, and the new grandchild came over for a meal and some late Christmas cheer. I joined the festivities via FaceTime. I'm so happy that even though I live so far away, I can still participate!

 

Roger's son and daughter-in-law are both black belts and teach in a Boston KungFu school. They've both been to China and Japan, so when I saw this pattern in the March/April 2012 issue of Just Cross Stitch I knew it would make the perfect wedding sampler.

 

Although it took me eight months to complete, it wasn't boring. I really enjoyed the different types of stitches in this samplers. And I am happy I was able to complete it for Christmas this year. It was worth the work.

 

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Book Review: A Schoolgirl's Work and Girlhood Pursuits

A Schoolgirl's Work: Samplers from the Spencer Museum of Art Barb Adams and Alma Allen (2011)

Girlhood Pursuits: A Sampling of Embroideries from the New Bedford Whaling Museum New Bedford Whaling Museum (2008)

 

These two small books are similar in many ways. Both provide photos, catalog data, and historical information on 24 samplers from their respective museum collections. But the collections themselves forced the writers down different narrative paths, both valid and both interesting.

 

A Schoolgirl's Work is a widely distributed book that presents 24 samplers from the Spencer Museum of Art. Each sampler is shown is full color, and plates include close ups and, most interestingly, the back of each piece. Since the samplers are presented in chronological order, the reader can see how styles changed through time. However, the samplers in this collection were acquired without a particular acquisition strategy. They were donated to the museum by people who collected what they liked or who donated family pieces. Few come from Kansas, and little is known about most of the stitchers. That said, the samplers, are all delightful, colorful and full of whimsey. As a result, the authors took up the slack in the narrative by developing patterns based on the samplers. These are are sweet, generally small projects, that provide mini lessons on deconstructing and reconstructing motifs for your own use.

 

Girlhood Pursuits also catalogs 24 samplers. This was an exhibition catalog and it is sadly not widely distributed. It presents much of the same information for each sampler as A Schoolgirl's Work (sampler height, width, materials, maker) but instead of the clear photography of the former, the plates in "Girlhood Pursuits" are darker and there is only one image of each piece. Since the poems and inscriptions are not always transcribed, this left me wishing for more detailed close ups. What this work has in its favor though, is the fact that all of the samplers depicted were either made in New Bedford or Dartmouth, Massachusetts or by someone with close connections to the New Bedford area. As a result, the authors were able to identify some of the embroideries as works of specific schools or derived from specific teachers and the histories of the girls who worked them are also known and presented. It provides a tantalizing start to understanding the social, economic and religious history of New Bedford through a female perspective.

 

The two approaches to cataloging these sampler collections are rooted in the organizations' acquisition strategies, and each organization made the best of what they had. New Bedford was able to piece together the story of these embroideries with much more clarity, which I appreciated, but as lovely as their samplers are, they don't compare with the delightful imagery and beautiful condition of the Spencer Museum of Art collection. I plan to use some of the motifs from the Spencer collection to develop my own sampler. Both works, however, remind us of how important it is for small local and regional museums to share their collections. Samplers, like their makers, often take journeys of their own, and sharing this information is the only way to reconstruct their meaning and the meaning of the lives that produced and cherished them.

 

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Plane projects

I flew home to Massachusetts just prior to Memorial Day. For my flight back in February, I packed a stump work project for the plane. I thought that because the pieces were small, it would be easy to work on my tray table. Was I ever wrong! the pieces threatened to go everywhere, there were too many thread colors, and the light was too poor for that type of intricate work. I had given up by the time my beverage came.

 

This trip I resolved to do better. A few weeks before I left, I started a monotone sampler on 28-count linen. It was a straight forward pattern, so I decided to stop stitching and save the project for the plane. It was perfect. I worked about quarter of it during my flights. The fabric holes were big enough to see in dim light and it was contained enough that I didn't elbow my neighbors even though I was in the middle seat. Plus my sewing kit was much simpler. Here you can see it. I carried a tin with my floss, scissors and needles, and kept it, my hoop, pattern and fabric in a woven envelope my mother once gave me. Perfect!

 

 

Only one problem. I stitched so much of it, I got a little addicted. When I found out that my stitching shop in Massachusetts would be closing in a few months, I decided to stitch faster so that I could finish it and bring it to the shop for framing during this trip. It is a gift, so I can't show it all yet, but needless to say, it is at the framers along with another sampler I finished last month--one of my resolution projects.

 

Unfortunately, this means that I've been in Massachusetts for two weeks and haven't yet stitched on my WELCOME. That may be coming home with me so that I can finish it up before Hoops and Needles closes for good. Ellen, the shop proprietor, says that she may still keep framing on the side. She does the best work around, so I am encouraged, but want to finish the WELCOME as quickly as possible. Besides, my husband has a blank wall ready to hang it!

 

One additional comment about my travels. I sat between a man and a woman on my first flight, and as I often find when I stitch in public, the man was the more curious of the two. Men inevitably say something like, "no one does that type of hand work anymore" and it always takes me by surprise. In this case I was wondering who might have done the hand work that he was recalling, but as I was thinking up a suitable reply he said something that really threw me. After watching for about 30 minutes, he declared, "I guess I could take up something like that if I were faced with a long prison term and could really concentrate on it." Wow! Good to know he is prepared for anything! He looked like a nice man though, so I don't think he will be taking up stitching soon.

 

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The projects I can't tell you about

One of the frustrating things about sharing my projects with the world is that I can't share the gifts I am currently stitching--even when they are big projects that take a long time to complete--because the recipient might see them.

I've got a couple of these projects underway and have spent many hours working on them this year already. Since I can't show you my progress, the next two blogs will showcase the large gifts I finished last year.

Today I will show you a wedding sampler that I made for my sister and brother-in-law's Christmas gift. Yes, they have been married 8 years, but my philosophy is that it is never too late to give a couple a wedding sampler.

This sampler was adopted from a pattern by Hillside Samplings called "Seasonal Samplings". It attracted me for two reasons. First, my brother-in-law is an active hiker who has already helped my 5-year-old nephew climb his first Adirondack high peak. I thought the pattern would appeal to him as well as to my sister. Second, it wasn't just cross stitch. There were several new stitches that I had never worked, which made me excited to stitch the pattern.

I started working the sampler last January and finished it April 1. My favorite Massachusetts needlework shop and framer, Hoops and Needles, had it framed before the end of the month, so My parents visited in the fall it was ready for them to bring home to New York and wrap for my sister. I'm told that it was greatly admired on Christmas morning.

The finished design measures approximately 6" by 15".

The strawberry blossoms were stitched with eyelet and satin stitches.

For this tree I replaced smyrna stitch accents with gold beads.

The rhodes stitch apples were particularly fun because I had never tried this stitch. I liked how it turned out.

 

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