Monday, November 07, 2011

Phaun

I signed up for another SAL with the HAED BB back in May or June. I've been saving the chart just waiting, and last night I finally started it. It's a long thin piece (like the other one I'm doing - Light of the World), but when I first chose it I decided I didn't want to stitch the cat's haunch as it seemed to dominate the picture due to the thin slice taken. Then when I was thinking about fabric - I knew I didn't want to do it on 25ct again, not that I have any left now - I decided I'd leave out the background too so a nice hand dyed would be good.

After rooting around in my stash I found a solitaire from Sparklies that would work. A very exaggerated mottled blue that I think will work well as the wall paper background. But it was 28ct and only 9x13". So I looked at my chart again and worked out the part I wanted to stitch (top two thirds), and how big that would be stitching over 2 on 28ct. 17". Oh. OK. Maybe not. But it was good fabric, and the next choice was a green fat quarter so I'd end up with a narrow bit of fabric left over, and I didn't want to do that either. So back to looking at the chart. I realised I could cut off about 30 rows from the top since I wasn't stitching the background, so that helped a bit. But it was still too long.

 So I looked at the fabric again and started thinking that if I only had a 1" border at top and bottom I could get 11" in there of stitching, which would be 154 rows. So minus the first 30 rows of chart that would take me to about the middle and still be a decent amount of cat. YES, I can now do it.

Then I pulled all the thread, I started trying to just pull what I'd need, but that got difficult, so I pulled everything I had from the list (still got some gaps, but I'll worry about those later) and got stitching. In my eagerness to fit it on the small piece of fabric I left less than half an inch of margin. After finishing my first length of thread my brain caught up with me and I pulled it all out and restarted with an inch of margin.

So here is my first picture of not quite the first length of thread finished. I would have finished the thread again and kept going a bit more too, but we didn't realise that the clock in the living room had reset itself back to daylight savings time (it's one of those ones that gets its time by radio signal and we thought it wasn't working so we adjusted it manually in the morning), and so we thought it was an hour later than it was. Once we realised that we changed the clock to mountain time as we couldn't get it to stay on the correct time. Then this morning it decided to go back to ordinary time again, so now it was an hour fast. So back to the correct time zone it went. Stupid clock.



And the full fabric:



I'm hoping to work on this each week slowly to make progress. I really need to work on Light of the World too, but I really don't like doing over one on 25ct, it's just irritating.

While looking for the fabric for this I was also looking for a piece for Tree of Stitches by Abi Gurden on the Stitch Specialists yahoo group. My original plan was to use overdyed threads and use a brown for the trunk, green for the leaves and pink for the blossoms - fairly standard really. But then I found the *perfect* bright pink fabric for it, and I'm not sure my colour scheme is going to work any more. So I'm now ruminating on thread colours to use for that. Perhaps I should go with a thread like the old Needle Necessities Calypso - although that might be too busy - I'll have to see.

And lastly - there are going to be fewer stitching updates than normal for a while as my main piece now is a pilot project that I can't share with you yet.

2 comments:

Cheryl said...

Wow! That's a lot of stitching/thinking going on there. :) I've been thinking about starting Tree of Stitches, too. But I can't seem to land on a particular color scheme. My most recent thought is to a bright or unusual color fabric from stash and stitch everything in black.But then the stitches might not show off well.

You are brave to attempt any sort of HAED. I think the solid stitching would drive me crazy, which I am aware is not much of a journey. ;) Good luck!

MysteryKnitter said...

You're busy with your stitching.