This all came about because I fell in love with Rosewood Manor's Trip Around the World Quilt, a marvelous stitched quilt with nearly none existant instructions with hard to read fuzzy line notations which are supposed to serve as the instructions.
This lab is going to be my attempt to organize my notes in getting through this design.
The picture on the chart does not do justice to the size of this thing: 24 by 31 (+/-) on 28 count cloth nor to the detail of the stitching. The colors?? Not my choices.
Slime green is never my first choice not even for samplers though I do have some stitched with eyeball vibrating neon greens. One of them is Essamplaire's Ann Phelps, an adaptation being made wider than charted.
Threads: use cotton or go for silk? I prefer to work on higher counts but the stitches might be too crowded: stay with the 28 ct listed...and ultimately stay with cotton.
Thread colors: As listed? Erm...no. (insert picture)
But how to change them? Fortunately the chart booklet gives a hint with an alternate pattern. Rosewood Manor's books always have other ideas for pattern use which is a great value added bonus. There are basically 2 colors used, with related family members and a neutral.
I finally settled on: (insert pictures) That hurt because I was sorely tempted to go Gold and Purple but I was afraid of what the eye would do in blending the colors once stitched possibly morphing it to something terra cotta like. If I wanted terra cotta, I would have used terra cotta. It was one of the family ranges I considered before settling on the Purple & Greenish Blue.
Colors settled, onto the cloth choice. After tossing on a limited selection of on hand yardages, my expected favorite flax lost out to the chart listed platinum (insert picture) but a platinum on the putty side of dyelots not the green - that I can tell.
Size calculated, cloth cut (bye bye yard! - add more to shopping list!) the search for unoccupied scroll rods began. No 30 inch scrolls were empty. Uh-Oh. Which project is going to lose its perch?
The Blackbird Designs Anniversary pieces all on 1 or the Scarlet Letter South Park Broom Ladies Sampler, more formally known as Sarah Willson?
Sadly, the South Park sampler has been inactive for at least a year. The Blackbird is an active piece which I have hopes of finishing this year (yeah, right). So, off came the broom ladies. Picture shows one of the broom ladies in all her glory on the model. My version doesn't have anywhere near this much done. This one, too, is a huge sampler, 25 by 28 on 35 count cloth.
Armed with threads, cloth, and an additional roll of scrap cloth for doodling, double checking strands.
Did I mention the instructions on this massive piece are nearly non existant? Granted, the book is thick already and instruction pages for the blocks would have made it heftier, I think sales would be larger for this. Anyone seeing this chartbook in the store would put it back once they looked inside and saw the lack of notation. I bought it even seeing the lack because I know I can figure my way through this. It won't be the first time I wrote or rewrote instructions on a chart.
(insert pic of sample "instructions" for color code).
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