A couple weeks ago, I showed you this new project I’m working on at home.
I haven’t made as much progress on it as I would like. Things have been a bit nutty on the home front, making it hard to concentrate and focus on a project for any effective length of time.
With the lettering on this piece, I’m using Soie d’Alger silk (you can read about it here – it’s a spun silk that handles like stranded cotton, but has a higher sheen and softer “spread”) in two shades of blue.
I wanted to use two shades of blue in order to keep the letters from looking entirely flat. The lighter shade helps give them some dimension, visually.
The filling is just a simple “long and short” stitch, which ends up being more like long-and-longer stitch, or sometimes just more of a split stitch filling – whatever works as I go, to fill the letter.
In the swirling confusion of the decor around this M, part of the letter got lost, and I didn’t realize I hadn’t stitched all the blue until I was taking photos.
For the letters’ serifs (those are the little decorative lines – like feet or caps – that are part of the letters), I split stitched those bits and worked an overcast satin stitch right over the thin split stitch line.
When I first started the letters, I just split-stitched the serifs, but the outcome was not as smooth as I’d like, so overcasting the split stitch lines with the satin stitch helped to smooth those out a bit.
At this point, I was antsy to finish the whole word, because I wanted to get on with the gold filigree around the M.
But that’s about when I noticed I hadn’t finished the M, and that’s as far as it went.
Hopefully, I’ll get back to this project this week, if things calm down a bit on the home front with Dad.
More Ahead
I have another home project going. I call it my “Night Project” because it doesn’t take any concentration and I can work on it in the evenings and at night, when my brain is ready to chill a bit. I’ll share progress on that with you later!
At the studio, we are cutting more fabric for the white and natural linen sample packs. We still have some of the natural in stock, but only a very few. So we’ll top those up for you!
We’ll have the final lesson on the Blackberries project this week, too.
See you soon!
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