Saturday stitching

Even though I really needed to go grocery shopping yesterday, I felt a little under the weather, so I decided to stay home and stitch.

My primary goal was to figure out what additional threads I needed to finish the Jane Zimmerman samples. I needed to let the project coordinator know what extra lengths of thread were needed. (I'm making up stitch samples to be photographed for two pages of Jane's next book.) These samples shouldn't take very long, because three of them are 24 x 24 threads, and two are 24 x 36 threads. However, the three smaller ones are queen stitch variations in three or four ply, and the threads need to be laid. Have you ever tried to lay multiple plies in queen stitch? You can get your threads all nicely side by side, and then you have to mush them sideways with a tie-down stitch. It's next to impossible to lay these things well. I'm settling for trying to make the threads cover the ground canvas, and I think it's working pretty well, though it is time-consuming. Anyway, I finished about 3-1/2 samples, and really can't do much more until my extra threads arrive later this week.

Scottlee was next up, and I made a bit more progress on the inside border. I finished the corner motifs all around. These motifs are hard to see in the photo, but they're in a metallic thread called Bijoux (formerly Lacquered Jewels). This thread comes on a spool, but fortunately it's much easier to control than some of the other metallics on spools. I say that's fortunate, because for most of the corner motif, 6 strands are used, and 8 strands are needed for the satin stitches.

Once the corners were done, I went back to filling in the border with alternating continental* stitch in two-ply silk. There will eventually be some accent stitches placed on top of this in pearl cotton.
* I could not find any place on the web that describes the stitch order of alternating continental as Christensen's The Needlepoint Book defines it, so I'm trying my own diagram. Note that the stitched thread will cross under an open canvas hole, but this seems desirable in some situations, and as long as it's consistent, it shouldn't be a problem. (If needed, click on the diagram to make it larger.)