The design in the book was stitched with Anchor cotton floss. While it gives it a nice, smooth, shiny look, I tend to not call it crewel. The defining word for me with crewel work is wool, which is apparently whence the word crewel derives! So while the design done in floss is pretty, I don’t call it crewel – it’s what I’d call “freestyle embroidery.” It’s a nit, I know. But I live in a world where nothing has the same name between two people — both embroidery and bellydance use different terms for the same stitch or move. It drives my ordered brain nuts!

Anyway. The color scheme I ended up with was dependent on the colors I had in my box in Appleton. In this case, golds and pinks rather than golds and oranges. Luckily the pinks have a very yellow cast to them, and actually blend pretty well with the gold, which surprised me. Learn something new with every sample! The turquoise is a little bright for the rest of the colors, but it’s not TOO horrible.

The sampler was focused on the basque stitch – which makes an interesting twisted chain-like spike. The outside of the flower to the right is done in this stitch, as is the center of two of the leaves. Quite pretty. I’d never actually done this stitch before, and I found it a bit tricky, especially to make the loops all the same size and avoid tightening the stitches too much. Combined with the fuzzy Appleton wool, well, I had a few issues!

Even close up the gold and pink don’t look too bad – maybe even pretty good together!

I think it came out pretty well!

Next motif – floss silks and “Society Silk” motif – yes, I know it’s my crewel sampler. But it’s mine, and I’ll play as I like!

Have a wonderful Christmas, if you celebrate it!

I’ve been thinking about thoughts. William and May Morris believed that Berlin Woolwork was a scourge on embroidery. Berlin woolwork, for those of you who don’t know the details was worked in very fine wool (often equivalent to 2-3 strands of our cotton floss in thickness), and was counted from a chart onto lightweight canvas in cross stitch. It often reproduced a piece of famous artwork, or just pretty pictures. Uh oh. This sounds familiar.  Could it be that this was just Counted Cross Stitch in wool? (Yup, it could. It is. It was.)

William and May Morris wanted to bring back what they considered the higher craft of “real” needlework. Crewel stitches. Design decisions on the part of the embroiderer. Silk threads. Embroidery that looked like stitch work and didn’t “just” reproduce a picture in pixel mosaic.

Now I’m not going to speak or type against counted cross stitch – I design the stuff, after all!  However, I was thinking about the book I gave away a couple years ago… “Art of William Morris In Counted Cross Stitch”. And then I got thinking about the cross stitch woolwork “reproductions” of Morris designs that are found as kits in the needlepoint shop (Beth Russell?)… and my thought?

I think William Morris is rolling around in his grave in despair.

And I’m laughing. Because embroidery techniques rise and fall in popularity. And while counted cross stitch has been very popular over the years since the 80s (partially because it really IS easy as these things go…) the freestyle embroidery stitches are coming back. Look on Craftster at some of the finished projects. Look at the popularity of Sublime Stitching. Look at the wonderful embroidery on the Ning groups: Hand Embroidery Network and Stitchin Fingers. These are good things. And we’re richer for the variety.

Try new things. Be a stitching dilettante!

I’d also probably do it in silk or metal thread work rather than wools, but that wasn’t the point of this exercise!

I AM pretty happy with the stitching, however. As usual, click to enlarge.

What I don’t think I’ve mentioned is that this piece of fabric is a piece of IL019 linen from Fabric-Store.com in white. I rather like it. It’s a medium-weight linen that I’d be happy to use for shirts. I also like their heavier-weight  linens for skirts and things like the great Shower Curtain project. Which fell off the radar this year, but I intend to transfer to the fabric in January. It’s not high on the priority list, because the bathroom it’s intended for low on the renovation list in the house. I should really be doing the work for the upstairs guest bathroom instead, but it’s not as interesting to me at the moment… maybe I need to rethink the design and technique for that one…

Click for a closer view!

This sampler really IS a sampler in the true sense of the word. It’s a place where I play – I don’t worry too much if my stitching is perfect, though I work to improve it. I don’t worry if the colors end up “going,” even failures have something to tell me, and the fact that they are stitched there for posterity reminds me of why not to do things that way again! This isn’t going to end up on a wall, it’s not going to end up in a gallery (at least not in my lifetime), but hopefully I’ll learn something good in the meantime, and later people can learn something from my fun and games. It *does* go to classes I teach with me.

The first motif on this piece of fabric is an Art Nouveau border from one of the Dover books. I worked it in Vineyard Silks Merino thread. I really like the threads from this company. The merino is soft and nice to work with, and the Vineyard Silk Classics are amazing (more on them later). The merino was designed for needlepoint – I think on 14 count canvas, so it is pretty thick to be working on motifs this small. I might use it again for a larger design that needed to be filled quickly. It’s got a nice hand, and a nice sheen when completed.

And I like my color choices here- the alternating pink/turquoise gives a little variety while still keeping a unified theme. This is a border pattern that I could see stitching around the hem of a skirt for spring or summer… but in a different thread, or in a bigger size.  We’ll see if I actually DO something like that with it!

As I recall, the motifs are about 2 1/2 inches tall (I’ve re-framed the work, so I can’t go measure it. I’ll try to remember to do it and edit this when I unlace it to move to a new motif!).

Done in woolwork, in Roumanian couching (a VERY American stitch, as it uses less wool), the design comes across as a bit rough and primitive, but is still absolutely charming to me.

It is part of a group that was stitched by “young ladies” at a school in Boston. I have no idea what age group “young” means in this context. The details are lacking enough that it could be anywhere from 8 to 15. I’d suspect, from the way the stitches are taken, that the stitcher was probably somewhere around 10. But it’s a guess. And an amateur guess, at that!

So I wasn’t in much shape to concentrate on anything in the way of stitching – especially things I have to think about, like cross stitch counting, or figuring out what stitch to put where or what color to put where in one of my own crewel designs. So I started DaisyChain ABCs by Posie, which also counts as a Monday Treasure! I fell in love with the pattern and ordered it when I saw it on the Spinster Stitcher’s blog.  She’s currently working on Needle Delight’s Aquamarine, and I’m fighting the urge to go buy a copy and start it, too, because it’s just so…. so… watery! (I’m winning this particular fight because it’s counted… and I’ve got counted projects galore right now!)

Because I just cannot do anything the way a pattern tells me to, I’m using the back of one of the EO’s dead dress shirts as the fabric – I love the color.  And since I don’t particularly like Appleton crewel wool because it’s so fuzzy, I replaced it with Renaissance Dying wool that I ordered from Hedgehog Handworks. Don’t go to that link — you’ll want everything on the site! (Don’t say you weren’t warned!) Otherwise I stuck with the colors specified, and the stitches specified. The only thing I’d do differently is use a slightly darker shade of blue – the blue in the “C” is very pale, and looks almost like the white in the “D” next to it.  And now that I’ve spent the weekend goofing off, I’m feeling much more coherent, and I’m back to stitching. The big blue thing now has a name – it’s “Chelsea” after my late model stitcher (she stitched the Alhambra model for me… I’m going to miss her). And I’m happy to be working on the Elisabetta sampler again. (Details of her, soon.)

If you enjoy quilting or other textile arts, the rest of her blog is also a wonderful read…

I highly recommend sliding into your local antique or junk shop. You might find a treasure like my poppies or the purse above…

The artist is Cayce Zavaglia, and her work is amazing.

I’m going back to nursing an ear infection now.

New Elmow on Wednesday!

Isn't it pretty?!

Last weekend I went to the Carolina Fiber Fest with some friends. It has been a long time since I’ve been to one of this type of event, and I’m afraid I forgot what the wool fumes do to me. For the most part, I was good, and didn’t spend a lot of money.

Unfortunately, I volunteered to teach my friends how to spin (Note to potential friends: Romilly is an enabler… you don’t want to shop textiles with me unless you want a new hobby, or a new toy to play with an OLD hobby…) And to do that, I had to have some of the same wool they were going to be using!

So I came home with five ounces of colonial roving. Pretty blue, turquoise and red.  It sat in my bag until Tuesday. Tuesday I broke down.

More yarn shots.

I borrowed my friend’s new spindle – both of mine had yarn on them already… got to finish that! and I wanted to play with the weight on hers in any case so I knew what she could expect… it’s light.  And two hours of work later, I have a skein of 130 yards of fingering weight singles… I may ply it later, I might not… and a little bit more. And I still have 2/3 of a bag of roving to go! I think I’m going to have a new shawl next fall. What do you think?

*I* think it’s time to dig the spinning wheel out of storage and see what I can do with it.  I originally learned to spin with the intention of spinning my own crewel wool… Maybe I’ll pull that idea back out. Drop spindles are perfect for that, because you can spin a small amount of fiber pretty easily.  I’ll keep you posted as to how that works!

Lucinda in the Rose Garden - the first design I created

I have a confession. It may seem strange coming from a cross stitch designer, but while I really love designing cross stitch, as I get older, I’m finding myself stitching less and less of it. This isn’t to say that I don’t still love it. In fact, last week I found myself very pleased with the meditative qualities I remembered while stitching a new pillow design (and boy did I need those meditative qualities at the time!)

For me, counted cross stitch was a gateway drug. It was the thing that got me beyond the hatred of that stamped cross and stem stitch sampler I started when I was six and only finished at 12 because I wanted to learn crewel, and my mother insisted that I finish EVERY project before starting another one (even if even SHE couldn’t figure out the instructions for the turkeywork stitch on that second crewel piece I tried…).

I taught myself counted cross stitch in the mid-80s for two reasons. One, I couldn’t find a crewel kit on the shelves to save my life. And second, I still had a bit of trepidation about starting a new crewel pattern when I hadn’t finished that first one.

My first cross stitch project was a little 18th century man with a no-smoking sign. I was hooked. My second… Theresa Wentzler’s Fantasy sampler. (And just to make Mom roll over in her grave, I’ll admit here and now that I STILL haven’t’ finished the thing, even though I love it and  want it on my wall.) People have told me that I didn’t finish it because it was too complicated for a first project. If that were the case I would have gone back to it, knuckled down and finished it later. No, I didn’t finish it because it still makes my eyes cross with all those blended threads! I’ve learned a lot about design from those projects that I haven’t finished, and I went on to start my own line… which kind of sidetracked me from stitching other people’s designs. The image above is of the very first design I ever created myself, with a link to the pattern purchase page. I’m about to send her companion, Talieson in the Rose Garden off to my model stitcher! Finally.

There are still three pieces by other people in my workbox: That Fantasy Sampler, Ink Circles Cirque des Cercles, and Indigo Rose’s Millennium Sampler, which is now hard to find. (There are more in the UFO box… But I’ll rotate those in later.) I do take a few stitches on them once in a while, which means that they will get finished at some point… but it’s not going to be soon.

And you can expect more than cross stitch from Golden Circle in the coming months/years.  Now, back to stitching that newest cross stitch model of mine…! (psst – it’s another pillow!)