March SAL

Hard to believe it's time to post progress on our chosen needlework projects already! I'm happy to report that I've done some embroidery since the last Stitch Along post in spite of life's little challenges. I finally put the last few flowers into the stamped pillowcase I started last year. The last time you saw it I'd done the large daisies, then the stems and leaves. Just recently I've stitched the little filler flowers in a light purple with back stitch.

I wasn't happy with the look though. The purple was too light. So I wrapped the back stitches with a single strand of a dark blue.

Before:

And after:

It's hard to see in person unless you're right on top of the embroidery. I'm happier with the look now.

Still need to hem the pillowcase though. The raw edges were serged by the manufacturer. I'll either give it a simple topstitched hem or try to add a bit of gathered eyelet. But that's a task for another day. 😉

In the meantime, I wanted something else to stitch that was of a similar scale to this pillowcase. The designs on the towels from Mary Corbet are fairly intricate. She recommends doing most of the stitching with two strands of floss, in some cases a single strand. I wanted to use three strands and be okay with taking larger stitches. So I pulled out an iron-on transfer pattern from my stash, cut it down to size, and added a central motif between the two sprigs I'd stitched on the first of the Corbet towels.

Of course the pattern didn't transfer evenly across the soft surface of my ironing board. And of course I thought I could place the patterns sheet exactly where it had been before to darken up the faintest lines.

Yeah, right. Next time I'm going to do my best to remember this experience and pencil in the missing lines. For the time being I'm just not going to worry about it.

I chose some reds from my collection of floss from the Victorian Motto Sampler Shoppe and stitched each of the large flowers in a slightly different shade.

Again, it shows better in person. They're not quite this dark, and you can see the various tones in the petals. This is just outline stitched with backstitching down the center of the petals. I may go back and fill in for more color... or I may not. I wanted to do something more, something fancier, for those petals but couldn't come up with anything that worked and I was willing to undertake.

Sometimes it's good to expand or strive to improve on our skills and other times it's enough to just keep your hands busy. That's my story and I'm sticking with it!

This SAL has quite a few participants, all over the globe. We post every three weeks, in our own time zone. I'm on the west coast of the USA while others are in Australia and Europe, as well as in the United States. Most everyone is well ahead of me in terms of time zones. We all work on our own projects so there's a variety of needlework to be seen. We have a returning member this time - Hello Linda! and two new members, Laura and Cathie - welcome ladies! Grab a cuppa and enjoy some eye candy. 😀

Avis, Claire, Gun, Carole, Sue, Constanze, Christina, Kathy, Margaret, 
Cindy, Heidi,Jackie, Sunny, Hayley, Megan, Deborah, Mary Margaret, 
Renee, Carmela, Jocelyn,Sharon, Daisy, Anne, Connie, AJ, Jenny, 
Laura, Cathie, Linda