Since the goldwork project is on hold till the rest of my materials arrive, I went back to my whitework sampler. My Lowery embroidery frame stand arrived this past weekend, and it has already made a huge difference in my ability to do whitework. It's so nice having two hands to sew with! And my left hand no longer gets stiff and tired from trying to grip such a large, heavy frame. Here's my whitework firmly clamped in the stand.
It was super quick to set up and it's very easy to adjust and flip the frame over when I get those annoying little knots in the thread. But by using the frame, I can control the thread a little better, so hopefully the incidence of knots will gradually decrease. Nothing frustrates me faster than a knot that takes me 10 minutes to undo.
At any rate, I have moved on to eyelets. Most of them are pulled thread eyelets - small and large round ones, diamond ones, and square ones. But I also tried a larger teardrop-shaped eyelet where I sewed the outline of the shape, cut the inside fabric in a cross shape, and then sewed the stitches around the outline and fabric to create the eyelet (the top right one):
That one was much harder to do that the others. I think I would probably trim off a little more of the fabric next time. But this sampler is all about learning. The rest of the eyelets have gotten progressively better and I'm learning little tricks to keep them even.
For example, before I pull one stitch tight and start the next, I hold the thread up and taut so I can see what hole it last came up through. That makes it easier to figure out what hole the next stitch should come up through. This helps a lot because with such tiny eyelets, the fabric gets pulled rather tight and it can be tough to tell where the next stitch should start. I'm going to do a few more eyelets and then move on to some other stitches — probably some counted satin stitch or other surface embroidery techniques.
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