Treat for Friday!!!

Yesterday I had the most wonderful experience - Paula and Moo joined us for morning coffee. We had our mandatory 'show and tell' and I was the winner! I know that sounds as though I had something exceptional to show but no! I had the opportunity to see and feel Paula's wonderful book of fruit. She has blogged about this on The Beauty of Life - do go and visit.

I had studied the book on her blog and thought it looked very lovely - definitely the understatement of the year! It is a treasure, a piece of art, and, hopefully, a family heirloom. While the photos do show each page well, to really appreciate this beautifully integrated piece of beautiful needlework one needs to view it in its entirety. I think she should be very proud of what she has achieved. It goes without saying - I had a lovely morning.

Afterwards I finished the second section of my pulled thread sampler for the Stitchin Fingers . I am working through Sharon's list (well the pulled thread component) alphabetically. I know that Algerian Filling stitch wasn't there in the alphabetical list but I wanted to do that and I regard it as a version of pulled satin stitch. Also I have done Algerian Eye and Ringed Back Stitch in a number of different TIF pieces so I did not repeat those at this stage. Hence the Festoon Stitch. I did a couple of rows of this as illustrated in Mary Thomas, then reversed a row and joined it to the previous one. I tried joining the curved section to the flat section of the one aboved (both rows in the same direction for this one) and the bottom two rows consist of moving every second movement across and leaving a gap between. Hopefully the scan will explain better than my words! I realise that doing this sampler in monochrome is not assisting reproduction - however I made a conscious choice to do so as I want to have a sampler of stitching without the distraction of colour.

I have also promised myself to try to complete a section of this sampler each fortnight - we shall see!