UFO #11: A little more green...

I didn't get so much done today what with sleeping late, going shopping and playing around with threads for both the ECS and PT - the post with the ECS colours can be seen here. The PT colours will be re-photographed tomorrow as either the images I had made were of all of the colours and out of focus/blurred or they didn't show all the colours. It's a shame I can't re-use time as then this project would already be finished! For now I bid you all goodnight and will let you see what my progress is tomorrow.

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.

UFO #11: Almost half way!

Just one more "row" of the centre squares / circles / whatchamacallits and I'll be exactly half way with the centre of the embroidery. I decided to take a photo of the complete work as it was time to re-hoop and it's easier to see how much has really been done when you can see it all than when you can only see a section in a hoop. You can really start to imagine how it will look when completed now.

It's late - silly o'clock even - so I'm off to bed now,  I'll be back tomorrow with the day's update.

UFO #11: Turquoise advances!

I finished all but one needle full of the dark green grey (3051) thread before deciding it was time to do another colour as it was starting to get uncomfortable working so high up in the hooped area before filling all the little squares with very light old gold (677) which is not very visible in the photo I'm afraid. I then moved on to do more of the turquoise (597) arrows. I plan on doing a few more needlesful of the turquoise before going on to do all the little filler squares, which require a lot of starting and ending of threads to avoid long jumps between areas.

Oldest had forgotten to take money for my thread to school so had to go back to get it - much grumbling occurred but he can't go tomorrow so it had to be today, he made the most of it and stocked up on his favourite chocolate bar from the Dutch equivalent of a dollar store/pound shop just round the corner from the sewing shop so he was happy in the end.

For those wondering - All the extra sleep I've been having lately (12 hour + nights) has been doing me the world of good and I'm feeling better overall, though I still have a nasty cough and sneeze a bit it's not as bad as it was.