Saturday 8 February 2014

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.

4 comments:

  1. The fabric you have is lovely and I agree that it is a good choice for this. You have no idea how excited I am that you are stitching along with me on this one!!!

    That 504 being replaced, not a good plan on DMC's part. The border has the first "bunch" in that color series 500, 501, 502, 503 and 504, so why mess with a good thing? I'm going to have to go to Joann's and get more today to make sure I have enough for the rest of my border. It really is the largest project I've ever done. and again YAY!! Stitch with me woman....after you finish the floor tile :D

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  2. I'm glad you agree it's a good choice :D Yes it will be fun stitching the same thing at the same time :)

    I hope that you can get enough to finish the border! Do let me know if there is a need for more than one skein of a colour - Teresa's site doesn't say there is but perhaps it wasn't included for this one.

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  3. I didn't even know they did this - replacing colors, I mean. Boo on DMC!

    I just saw a piece of the Driftwood linen on ebay, but it looks like they won't ship to europe :/

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    Replies
    1. One reason is that in the 90's they had to change the way they did the colours due to new European laws - they went to a great deal of trouble to try and keep all the original colours the same and at first they did keep all the colours but later they decided to trim back a little.

      Don't worry about the driftwood - I have fallen in love with the fabric I have :D

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