Lots of Little Projects

I took the goldwork tulip off the frame, and it lies beautifully flat, with nary a sign of puckering. What a difference a quality frame that holds the fabric really taut makes!

But the mounting board that came with the project cuts off too much of the silk background for me. I want more of the silk to show since it has such a beautiful sheen, and I just feel the tulip needs more space around it. So I will probably eventually get this piece custom framed and mounted. But for now, it’s going in between two pieces of muslin in my chest of finished projects that need to be framed. I just have nowhere to hang anything right now. My apartment is a little small, with not nearly enough wall space. :( I hope someday I’ll have a house with masses of wall space. 

But on to other things! The last couple of days I have sulkily been working on one of my bobbin lace bookmarks:

Alas, I have not been in a lace making mood. I find it requires the right mood to really settle down and make significant progress and enjoy it. I’ve been trying to do 15 minutes a day, but I go to it with a great deal of resigned petulance and some days ignore it completely. The mood was really with me from March to mid-June, but now I want to do other things. 

This is why I’ll never really be fabulous at anything. I get bored so easily that I need a great deal of variety to keep me going. I like to constantly be learning. So I have a lot of hobbies and do reasonably well at all of them, but I am much more a jack of all trades than a master of anything. I have accepted this about myself, though, and I’m okay with it. 

I have had so many ideas for projects rolling around in my head that today, I sat down and spent hours just sketching them out. I have a reeeeeally good eraser, which I use a lot. And I design and redesign patterns until I love them. 

Here’s a border I have been contemplating for the table runner that I made all that lace edging for:

I am not entirely satisfied with it and will probably make lots of changes to it, but I think I like the idea of a double row of hem stitch in drawn thread work, with the embroidery trailing over and around it. It seems elegant and delicate enough to work well with the lace. And the hem stitch has a lacy effect, which will probably help with the transition to the actual lace. In particular, I’m not thrilled with the flowers. I need to redesign those. Something more dainty, I think. 

But time enough to figure that out. I have recently become enraptured with Mary Corbet’s Jacobean sea piece and have decided I want to try my own hand at a Jacobean embroidery project. I wish Mary had an e-book or kit out for hers, but it will probably be a while before she gets that done since she just finished the piece. So in the meantime, because I lack patience for sitting around and waiting, I decided to design my own. I used elements I found all over the web, altered them to suit my tastes, and made up other elements of my own to create this design:

I like it pretty well. It has a lot of variety and should allow me to use tons of different stitches and multiple shades of two or three main colors. I would love to do it in silk, but I’m reasonably confident I can’t afford to. Still, it would be pretty in even DMC floss. 

For my first effort at silk, I have been considering doing a silk and silver work peacock plume. Here’s my first draft:

I think it’s too wide. I need to make it narrower and longer, but I like the part where the colored spot is. I’ll probably tweak this a bit more and make it more stylized. But it’s something to be going on with. 

For now, though, it’s back to my whitework sampler. I’ve been doing some counted satin stitch, which I do love the look of, but I confess I find it tedious in the extreme to sit and stitch:

I need to finish the little herringbone section before I move onto a square of some other technique. Unfortunately, I got some kind of stain on the bottom part of that. I’ll have to try and clean it later and see if it will come out. I’m usually more careful when doing whitework, but I had something under my fingernail and discovered it too late. C’est la vie. 

So that’s what I’ve been working on. It’s been so nice to have three days to just relax and do whatever I fancy on all my little projects. My vacation to northern Arizona is the day after tomorrow, so I’ll probably take a little break from embroidery and lace while I escape the hellfire that is Phoenix in July. Three days up north sounds delightful right about now.