A Year in Stitches Part Three

You may recall that I've been trying to avoid activities that would aggravate my shoulder injury and consequently picked up my Year in Stitches sampler project. You can see the first two blocks in this post. I put the final stitches in the third block today.

My original goal was to experiment with stitches I'm less familiar with. I also wanted to just stitch whatever I felt like at the time. All of the floss I used was Nancy Turner's hand dyed thread (she's having another give away right now if you want to have a chance at a free box of shades of purple).

I used rows of some of her variegated purple to make the herringbone stitch "rainbow." The yellow flowers in this upper corner were inspired by a plant in Kris Peterson's garden that she brought in recently for In A Vase on Monday. The red border is closed buttonhole. I'm freehand stitching all of this, no drawing ahead of time or using any sort of tool to keep things even. This is my continuing effort to overcome my innate perfectionism.

The butterfly's wings are done with a variation of a chain stitch. I'm pretty happy with the way they turned out. The cone flowers are colonial knots, lazy daisy stitches, and closed herringbone to make the leaves. I'm also pretty proud of those!

Now I'm going to have to cut some fabric to set up the next block for this ongoing project. Sad to say, I've already been pressing and cutting a little and I can say my shoulder isn't happy about it. 😢