A failed experiment!

This seemed to be an exercise in "what not to try again". I have never managed to do more than one or two of the TAST stitches that Sharon Boggon ran on her blog in 2007. For many reasons - not the least, I did not discover TAST until the challenge and the year was well under way and even then I had trouble threading a needle, much less attempting any of those "fancy" stitches.

Well life moved on and with 3 of Sharon's classes under my belt I have decided to take on the challenge. I have made the decision not to join the TAST group on Stitchin Fingers - I feel I am unable to commit to a timetable and really want to work through these at my own pace.

I have girded my loins and printed off Week 1 and am ready to go with Herringbone Stitch. I did use herringbone in some samplers for the PLOS class last year - I need to see exactly what I have already done.

Whilepasting the printout into my journal I was taken by two examples of varying heights - as these were two illustrations which I labelled them #7 and #8. Sharon has done these on dyed Aida. I am always on the lookout for stitches that might be suitable for pulled thread work and since I had already used freehand pulled herringbone for the background in my last TIF piece I wondered if these variations might be interesting possibilities.So I filled in one of the squares in my sampler for stitchalong - here is the back view of #7 and #8 .



- not very exciting but better than-



the front view. For #7 I 'stacked' the rows with no threads in between while I left 3 threads between the rows in #8. This took most of the afternoon - my eyesight is not the best and today was greyand dull.

I am definitely not complaining about the weather - after all, we did not even lose power on Sunday afternoon while some people in the western suburbs are still without power and , in many cases, without a roof! A horrific storm came through late afternoon and left devastation in its wake. The rain is still falling - filling the dams - but a headache for the emergency teams. There is a news story here.



Pulled Thread Sampler so far -this must surely qualify as 'slow cloth' . I spent some time recently stitching the outlines for this sampler so have crossed Back Stitch off my list on the stitchalong.

Now I need to get onto my November TIF - I like the idea of playing with my initials but then how can I resist using those gorgeous jacaranda colours that Sharon has given us for this month? Jacaranda trees are favourites of mine - my next post will feature some photos I took recently.