Whitework Progress and Jacobean Updates

My trip to Flagstaff was pretty nice. It was much cooler, and the area is beautiful during summer. Here's a lovely pic of the aspens we saw on our hike up at Inner Basin:


We hardly saw a soul on our hikes, and at most restaurants, we were the only customers. Social distancing was fairly easy to achieve, and we wore masks anytime we were indoors or near a group of people. 

But shortly after returning home  on my birthday, in fact — I got sick. Super sick. Fever of 104, chills, terrible body aches, severe headache, and a cough that only seems to be getting worse. I finally saw my doctor yesterday, and he's pretty confident it's COVID. It’s running rampant in Arizona right now unfortunately. So I’m isolating, making lots of smoothies in my new Vitamix (gotta have fluids!), and resting up a ton. I don’t have much energy for embroidery or anything else, but I do have a small update for you. 

Just before I went on vacation, I redesigned my Jacobean piece a little bit. Here's the original design for reference:


I just thought it needed a more flourishing stem and some other tweaks for balance. Here's the redesign: 


It’s still pretty close. I just like this new version a little better. The top flower on the left seems more balanced, and the angle of that large flower on the right feels more natural. The curve of the stem is a touch more dramatic, and the design as a whole feels more engaging, with a little better flow. When I get better, I'd like to get this transferred to some material and start stitching it. I have an exciting color scheme in mind.

I've really been too sick to do much embroidery or lace work the last week. But just before I got sick and here and there in short intervals since then, I've done a little more stitching on my whitework sampler.

I finished my counted satin stitch section and managed to clean that stain reasonably well using some of those on-the-go detergent wipes:


I like these stitches. They're pretty and kind of interesting for filling stitches, but to be honest, they're a pain to do. I felt like they took forever, and it was super easy to get my counting wrong by one thread. But maybe in small, irregular patches of a larger piece, they wouldn't be too bad.

Next, since I wasn't feeling great, I moved on to simpler designs. First up was just some regular surface embroidery, but done in white:


The stem is stem stitch, the tulip is long and short stitch, the leaf on the left is fishbone stitch (which I really need to practice), and the leaf on the right is padded satin stitch. It was interesting to see the effect in all white. I kind of like it. It would be a little bit boring without the other whitework techniques, but as part of the sampler, it's nice to have it there.

The last square I did involved a satin stitch and cutwork flower:


It's not a great picture. The shadows make it look like there's a weird gap on the top left petal, but there isn't in real life. (I’m too tired to set up better lighting and retake it, so we’ll all have to live with my crappy COVID pictures for now.) I used cotton perle no. 8 instead of embroidery floss to do this satin stitching. It was my first time using cotton perle, and it worked okay. It just doesn't look as satiny to me. 

Cutting out the center was tricky. I did accidentally cut a couple of threads in my satin stitch. But I secured them to the back, and it didn't change the look too much — especially not for a sampler. But if I were to do cutwork in the future, I think I'd want to use a pair of curved scissors to help me cut more carefully.

Anyway, there's my update for the last ten days. And now it's time to go back to bed and take some really strong cough medicine before I cough up a lung. Hopefully I'll be well soon and back to stitching glorious things. But I'm gonna need a little more rest to get there.

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