TW: English Cottage Sampler

My dear friend Carla  has bravely started doing Teresa Wentzler's English Cottage Sampler and after a long search, a plea for help and some more searching she managed to get her hands on what appears to be the last piece of  Dublin Linen "Driftwood" that is the correct size. When I mentioned that I may be doing this embroidery myself too she ran off and started searching for some for me, so I too could do the embroidery on the fabric that Teresa intended. Unfortunately none could be found however…

A couple of weekends ago I got this mystery Zweigart fabric - it's 25ct and burn tests showed that it's not got any synthetic material in it - which I was planning on using for the embroidery. To show what the threads look like on the fabric I dug in my stash, got them all out and laid them on the fabric on my desk (over the stuff I have on it, hence the lumps and bumps in the image lol).

This is a close-up of the fabric using the macro setting on my camera - please ignore the blurry edges - it always does that. As you can see it's a nice neutral colour that's not white and it has some interesting speckles of brown in it here and there.

While I was digging out the threads I wondered how people coped with the colour changes that happened after many of Teresa's patterns had been created. The 504 for example which has been "replaced" with the 3813. I happen to have both in my stash so I compared the two and the 3813 is a slightly different shade to the 504 - different enough that I wonder why DMC chose to remove the 504 as they have so many other colours that are even closer in colour than these two are.