If you’ve been hanging out with me for a while on Needle ‘n Thread, you might recall that last August, I ran a give-away for some really fun over-dyed embroidery threads from LES Designs.

Recently, Lorraine overhauled her embroidery thread business, renamed it to Colour Complements, and established a bright and beautiful new website, which has a blog attached, where you can keep up with her thready news.

After selecting colors and threads to get started with, I was super eager to get into stitching on the Secret Garden project.

You might think that I’d start with the hummingbirds, since they’re in the middle of the project, and they’re the focus of the project. After all, a jeweler starts with the stone before creating the setting, right?

Well, call it backwards, but I’m starting with the setting, and specifically with the vines, because they are the continuous force in the design. They go everywhere. They hold it all together.

Besides, I’m still ruminating on those hummingbirds. I haven’t conquered them yet in my mind, and working on the rest of the project will give them time to work themselves out in my head.

After comparing several different types of cotton embroidery threads to use in the Secret Garden Hummingbirds embroidery project, I finally came to a painful conclusion.

Remember that telescoping magnet we talked about a few weeks ago?

That thing is So Dang Handy! If I didn’t convince you that you need one for needle-hunting-and-retrieving, let me show you a new use for it.

And dagnabit, it might even be a Better Use! Why I didn’t think of it earlier, I have no idea. All these years…

Today, we’re going to finalize our examination of cotton embroidery threads, insofar as they relate to the Secret Garden embroidery project. I’m sure there are many, many angles from which we could examine many, many more types of cotton embroidery threads, but for now, we’ll finish with the choices for this particular project.

Previously, we examined both floche and coton a broder side-by-side and looked at their size and construction. We then lined them up, unstitched, against the more familiar perle cotton in various sizes and regular 6-stranded cotton embroidery floss. Then we looked at perle cotton and stranded floss, stitched. And now it’s time for floche and coton a broder, side-by-side, stitched.

Have you noticed that there aren’t a whole lot of surface embroidery kits for general embroidery available on the market?

Individual designers produce their own kits in specific techniques, but when it comes to general surface embroidery (as opposed to goldwork kits, whitework kits, stumpwork kits, etc.), you have to do some real looking to find any available on the market.

The French Needle carries a variety of surface embroidery kits imported from Switzerland. Among them, I particular like the Canevas Folies embroidery semi-kits. I like their little floral kits best, because they incorporate a large variety of stitches into a relatively small, pretty surface embroidery project.

Canevas Folies has recently produced a line of decorative floral initials in semi-kit form, and I think they’re really pretty!