Work in Progress Wednesday - 2 Oct 2013

Hi!  It's Wednesday again and here's the update on the sampler work.  This first photo above is the completed garden section which will show through the cutwork to be done in the large square section you can see lower right in (almost) the full piece below.

In the shots above and below, you can also see that I've been getting well on with the cutting out.  I won't do any more thread snipping now until these sections are done and, having had a good look at the pattern etc, I don't think they will be much of a problem, as I'm quite used to hardanger sections.  I've never done buttonhole bars or picots before, so I want to practice those before putting them in the real thing though.

Next week I hope to be able to show these 12 sections filled and the long side bar sections cut - maybe the square section too.

Now that the surface work is finally complete bar a few beads in the bottom section, I thought it was high time to put away all the stranded cottons that had been used in this piece.  Most of them had been out in the kit bag for over three years, (yes, you read that correctly!  I had the piece kitted up for about 18 months before I started on it - I did it in August 2010 in Taiwan!), and it had been as long as that or longer since all my stranded cottons were neatly in their bags.  I don't need regular Anchor cottons for any of the three projects that are unfinished at the mo.  The L*K is using GAST - Gentle Art's Sampler Threads, the sampler now needs only pearl cotton #12 and a few stray strands of cotton left out for attaching the beads, and the old peacock feather uses three shades of Anchor Marlitt and some plastic/nylon sort of invisible thread, which is horrid stuff!!

This is the pile I put away this morning:

First I laid them all out according to colour number so that it was easier to get them into the right bag, but I thought they made an attractive display in themselves (even though the light was terrible first thing this morn!)  I can't think why black was there as I haven't used it in this piece.  Must have been hanging around from something else.

I had to re-lay out several of the bags, which were first done the best part of a decade ago, and it made me think that I need a more user-friendly storage solution for them than in grip-top bags in the centre of my main workbox.  Trouble is, I can't think of anything that would work!  I want to keep them in shade number order as it makes them easier to find when I'm working a design that just gives a list of numbers - and besides, I like it that way!  So, I don't want to start moving them into colour families and I don't have much more space or money to invest in anything fancy.  I also definitely don't want to be spending hours on end winding 450 or so skeins of thread onto floss bobbins, so that idea is out and wouldn't be space effective anyway.  If you can think of anything that will work within the parameters of what I already own, then please share...

My Lizzie*Kate cross stitch is coming along swimmingly and has been terrific to work on when the big sampler was out of the question at any given time.

I've also been spending some of the cash I made from my recent e-bay auctions on some more threads this morning.  I've ordered 17 more Pipers shades, which should fill in many of the gaps in my colour spectrum there and also some more Anchor Pearl #12 in landscape shades.  They should come within the next day or two and, if Susan from Pipers is as quick off the mark as she was with my last order, then I hope to see those threads here in about a week too.  I haven't put in an order from Sew-and-So since well before we went to Taiwan, summer 2009. I think I may have ordered some Caron Watercolors for a hardanger project I was doing at that time, but no collection building stuff, so it was really fun to do it this morning.=)

Oh, and talk about exasperating:  I had my Boot 'flu jab yesterday lunchtime and what should arrive in today's post but my latest lot of Boots Advantage Card offers with '250 points for buying your winter 'flu jab at Boots'!  Oh well!  I'll ask them if I can add it on retrospectively.  They'll almost certainly say 'no', but they won't have a chance to say 'yes' if I don't ask, will they?=)

Text and images © Elizabeth Braun 2013