A Merry New Year

Merry Cox, that is. I completed the stitching on my other optimistically dated project, the sampler from Merry Cox's A Diminutive Sewing Set (copyright 2005), very early the morning of January 2nd.


I'd been working on it for several hours on New Year's Day and wasn't willing to put it down until I finished it. So, my optimistic date is off by about 26 hours, which is okay with me even though the sampler just says 2006. Additionally, since my birthday occurs mid-year, this was technically stitched during both my 36th and 37th years of age, but you may notice I didn't bother making any correction or addition for that fact either.

In my opinion, neither of those two "errors" is nearly as annoying as how obvious this particular design makes it that I am truly lousy with centering lettering -- and even that doesn't bother me all that much on this piece because it's just too pretty not to love. ;>) Actually, I wasn't really trying all that hard to center the lettering because I was sort of winging things by stitching as I thought of something appropriate rather than truly planning ahead. If I were to restitch this piece, though, I would stitch the border first, which would have given me better guidance in terms of stitching the lettering. I stitched the border last because I was so eager to get right into the heart of the design.

Keeping in mind
my experience working in tent stitch on Birds & Berries, I chose to stitch the lettering on this piece in cross stitch instead of tent stitch. Both pieces use the same fiber for the text, Gloriana Winter Woods, and are stitched on the same fabric, Wichelt's 32 count sandstone linen, so you may find it interesting to compare the way the text looks different between the two.

I made several changes to this piece from the way Merry charted it. In some cases, my changes resulted from stitching errors on my part. For instance, I went with a simple back stitch border rather than the feathery border Merry designed because I didn't correctly determine where the left side needed to be, meaning I either had to frog or make a design change. I miscounted somewhere while stitching at least the stems and leaves (and perhaps the flowers, too, which I stitched first) in the bottom portion of the design; after that, I used the chart as a guide but stitched it such that things looked good to me.

I also made intentional changes. Where I have "Squirrels Nest Getaway," Merry had charted another slightly different alphabet; admittedly, I was a bit tired of stitching alphabets at that point, even in such a gorgeous color. At the bottom, I used my blog name as inspiration instead of stitching, "a gift for [insert name]" -- because I'm not letting this one out of my sight, LOL. I extended the sampler bands of specialty stitches to fill in space where Merry suggested putting one's initials, since the sampler would already have my full name on it.

I don't know why Blogger has made this picture so small, but if you'd like to see it bigger, just click on the picture.

Now to decide what to stitch next ...