Sunday, January 18, 2009

The Neverending project

Wow, this one is a real "blast from the past". It is "Dutch Beauty" from Permin of Denmark.

I started this piece on 1/2/2000, so it's one of my older Works in Progress (WIPs). It's on Strathaven Linen, which is a 32/34 count, so it's a slightly uneven weave. This makes it great for historic samplers, which were stitched on handwoven fabric, of course. It's a very dense linen with a lovely hand. I'd love to have more of it.

I chose this linen because it will make my finished sampler very close in size to the original. I do try to do that with historic reproducations as much as possible.



DB is HUGE - a full yard of linen as you can see. Walt called it "the tablecloth" to tease me. BTW, I apologize for the really bad picture, the lighting was terrible. The linen is actually cream colored, not brown.

In eight years, I've only managed to finish 7 panels of the 21 that make up the pattern. I need to do better if I ever want to finish the beast. So I'm putting it into the rotation.

Here's what I got done this week. Five hours was about half of Page H - which is the start of the center row. Left hand border, the center stem of the spray of flowers, the vase and established the "ground" line for the center row of motifs.



This is not at all a complicated piece - it's all cross stitch over 2 and there's only about 15 thread colors; it's just that it's so blasted BIG LOL.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I am inspired. I began this project about the same time you did. I belonged to a group, I believe a Yahoo group, who was going to stitch it. An unpleasant quarrel over the spinning monkey not only "altered" the group, but cause me to put mine away. I think it is time to revisit it.

Gaila Dianne