Tuesday, March 24, 2009

My First Blackwork Project - Sampler




This is my first blackwork ever. I'm making a sampler on 28 count Monaco fabric.

I have masking taped the long edged to prevent fray and basted the top of the fabric to my scroll bars.

I am using DMC cotton embroidery floss. I thought that since this was going to be such a large project and since it is also a learning project, I didn't want to spend the money on expensive linen and silk thread. I'm saving that for a coif later.

I started by measuring out a margin. My thought here is to frame it when it's done, which also means I don't have to do everything in Holbein stitch. So far, this is all back stitch work.

Once I got the margin measured out, I put in a border stitch, all the way around. This was a mistake that I didn't realize I made until I completed the top row of the key pattern, and my border stitch was 1 stitch too far to the right. This created a "hole" in my key pattern in that corner. I can't just pull out that border, since the floss has already marked up the fabric, and it would leave that line there, and I don't have room for another key repetition to cover the line without throwing the whole symmetry and margins off.

So I have a hole in the top right corner.

I'm currently going down the sides, and I'm now dreading the ends of the lines. Depending on how far I'm off, I might be able to pull out the bottom margin stitch and put the key pattern on the old line. We'll see when I get there.

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