Today has been a good day.

We've been treated to a day of warm temperatures and soft winds. Even though it was grey and snowing I found myself smiling and realized part way through the afternoon that it was because the warm temperatures were making it feel a bit like spring and that is just the best feeling you can get in the cold dark months. As I walked home I had to loosen my scarf and the ties on my hat to keep from overheating. I'm sure I could have taken my mittens off too.

I had a parcel in the mailbox. Inside was some linen for my Dessert of the Month sampler and three skeins of hand dyed floss that I'd picked at random off the colour card while I was on the phone ordering the linen. It turns out they are Easter egg colours so there was some more spring in my day. The other colours I've got are all sort of earthy so they don't really go together but it is nice to expand my collection a bit.

When I was putting my new floss away I came across this tiny sampler I started years ago. I think it is from when I was at university. I didn't bother to check just now but I'm pretty sure this is 32 count linen and my goal was to see just how tiny I could make cross stitch. All those perfect, tiny exes make me smile. I pulled out my new lens to take some pictures of them.

I got a nice picture of Abby while I was playing with my camera.

I was putting away an order of things I'd received The Workroom when I found this disk tucked into the folds of my fabric (spool of thread included for scale). I think it is intended to become a necklace; it would certainly work nicely as one. After taking a few pictures of it and finding a home for it on the shelf above my sewing machine - a favourite spot for new and interesting treasures - I realized that the little holes are probably meant for thread and I can make my own embroidered disk necklace. I'm trying to decide what sort of a design I'd like to use. I've got a few vintage cross-stich patterns and instructions for some samplers with interesting stitches. I'm not sure if I want something kind of old fashioned looking or if it should be something modern or some combination of the two. I see some intensive pattern searching in my near future.

This quilt is consuming my brain. I can't bring myself to change the thread in my machine to work on something else. I'm so curious to see how it turns out I just have to keep working on it. It's almost all I think about while I'm at work and the first thing I want to do when I get home. I've got six large panels done now. I tried to lay them out on the floor on Saturday morning, just to get an idea of how I'll be putting things together and how big this quilt will be, but the floor would not co-operate.

I decided to move on to step two.

The bag of scraps this quilt came from included pieces of muslin along with all the quilting cottons and I had decided to just sew in the muslin scraps like everything else. Once I was working with larger pieces of quilt top I thought the muslin looked a little too plain and wanted to spruce it up a bit.


I had a package of Sublime Stitching embroidery designs (actually intended for some very comfortable but boring underwear) that looked perfect for the task. This is the Flower Power set and they are a lot of fun to use. I transferred on different designs for different sized pieces of muslin, kind of randomly. Some of the larger pieces were big enough for two or three designs to fit together. A few pieces were too small for anything. I experimented with using different stitches (well, stem stitch) but mostly stuck to back stitch because it's so easy.


I'd forgotten how much I enjoy embroidery. It's so quick and satisfying. I don't know why I don't do it more often. There must be all sorts of things I could embelish. You can make it as complicated as you like, though I tend to keep things rather simple. I like the way it makes me think about the weave of the cloth I'm working on; something that was previously a smooth expanse becomes a network of lines and spaces and I'm trying to decide which space would be best to push the needle through.


I love the textural quality of embroidery. It always seems like it should just be flat - it's a line drawing after all - but the design is raised and almost sculptural. I like to think that even someone who could not see would enjoy touching a piece of embroidery.


For those tiny spaces too small for any of the transfer designs I realized I could make things up. A fun adventure and not anywhere big enough to be intimidating. I'm now finished two of the quilt panels but that doesn't really tell me how many embroidery patches I've got left because the muslin pieces are not evenly distributed throughout the quilt. I know there is one with cat-tails still to do; I'm thinking of trying some satin stitch.