A little progress has been made on Windows into my Heart, a design by Ruthmarie Hofmann. The first thing I had to do, as you can easily imagine after a 4-year hiatus, was to reread the entire project instructions and also all the notes that Ruthmarie gave us during that cyberclass and she was quite generous about them too. So, somewhere between reading most of it, but not quite all of them, my little fingers started itching for stitching, so stopped reading and started working on the right side of the heart. The last little section is filled with basketweave stitches. I do love stitching basketweave so much more than tent stitch. I had to refresh my memory about it as I do not work that stitch all that often. One thing that I always need to remember is that when I am going UP, I need to cover the HORIZONTAL mesh of canvas and when I am going DOWN, I am covering the VERTICAL mesh. The rest is a piece of cake, as they say.
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Next to that basketweave section, I did a vertical row of French Knots, which is another stitch that I love to do. I have a book called French Knot Pictures by Christine Harris and each time I look at it, I say to myself, I need to make one of these projects made entirely in French Knots. At first I was thinking of making those French knots using my red thread, but after I finished stitching the basketweave, I decided against it. I thought that the overdyed thread would do a better job. I used 4 strands of the overdyed and only one wrap. That makes a much better looking knot then when making two wraps. To make things more interesting, I also put together the threads in opposite direction in my needle, two on one side and the two other on the other side, which mixed the colors even more in my needle. My thinking for doing that was that it really does not take much thread to make one wrap and I was concerned that I would not get enough color change in my row. I like the end result.
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What now remains to do on this piece is the large section on the left which will be covered with free-form eyelets using the same overdyed thread that I have used for the other square eyelets and French knots. I will be adding lots of beads and French knots in that section.
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After that is completed, the only other section left to stitch will be the narrower vertical section close to the middle of the heart. There I will need to make some serious decisions. I will still be using the same overdyed thread, but not sure what stitch I will use. I will leave that decision until I get there. By then it will be much easier to see what will look nice and what will be a no-no.
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There is a little bit of news about all of you who loves Tanja Berlin of the Berlin Embroidery website in Canada. Tanja has decided to start a Gallery to showcase her customer's completed designs of hers. She contacted me not long ago to ask if I wanted to participate. She knew about my completed work because I had taken advantage of her Free on-going critique. I sent her photos of the two projects that I had completed and they are now there with many from other stitchers around the world. I thought that was such a neat idea in more ways than one. Anne Stradal does the same thing on her website where she has a special Guest Gallery. No doubt that there are others out there. I just don't know about them.
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Better go back to my stitching as my list of projects to do is not getting smaller, but bigger all the time.
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Pierrette =^..^=
