A Work in Progress

My Scarlet Letter sampler, Scottish Band, is finished!  In my mind, it's a major accomplishment as I had to deal with a dye lot issue that caused me to frog the left half of the medium blue flame stitches as well as an issue with the chart.  For the life of me, I couldn't get the placement of the flame stitches on the chart to look like the picture of the sampler.  After I've lived with my finish for a week or two, I'm pretty pleased with the way it came out.  And I've almost forgotten what a pain it is to do the backstitches around the letters.  My Amazing Christmas Stars quilt is also done and in use.  This was a Designer Block of the Month from Fat Quarter Shop for 2009 or 2010.  It was hard to get a picture of the entire quilt inside my house, so the top two pictures are the left and right sides.  The bottom photo is a closer picture of the center of the quilt and the third one is of my favorite block.  My longarm quilter did...

I'm making some progress on the Scottish Band Sampler (Scarlett Letter).  The Hungarian flame stitch eats up a lot of thread and a lot of time.  I'm liking the secondary pattern that is emerging.  I'm hoping to finish this one entirely before I go to my sampler guild's retreat next weekend, but I would settle for a finish of the eyelets and flame stitch.  Speaking of the sampler guilder, one of its members who shall remain nameless (she knows who she is) committed a tremendous act of enabling.  She brought in a needlepoint piece she had obtained through the Shining Needle Society, a Yahoo group.  Of course, I had to check it out and now I, too, am taking a class through the society.  Here's my progress on Inchies, a wonderful design by Kathy Rees of Needle Delights Originals.  I have self-imposed a limit of one "inchie" a day because these are like potato chips--you can't stitch just one!  And if you are interested in needlepoint, do...

Progress continues on the Scottish Band Sampler (Scarlett Letter).  I had set a goal of finishing this by the end of August-ha!  As predicted in the instructions, the flame stitch is "quite challenging."  For me, it was not the actual execution of the stitch, but the placement.  What I have done follows the chart, but doesn't look like the picture of the finished piece.  After frogging and restitching twice, I'm going with what I have now.  I'm sure it will be OK and as long as I don't display the picture from the chart next to my completed sampler, no one will be the wiser.  Since I last posted, we  made a trip to retrieve our daughter from her summer internship on the coast of Maine.  She stayed with her boyfriend's family who very graciously showed us around the area during the weekend we were there, and treated us to a fabulous meal of lobster.   Our daughter was home for three days and then we packed up ...

In the past few weeks, I've settled into a bit more of a routine and I'm accomplishing quite a bit on the home front.  I don't know about your house, but ours seems to accumulate piles of papers.  In between lunching with friends (most of whom will, sadly, have to return to work at the end of August), I've managed to put a lot of that paper in the recycling bin or file it away.  So our house is looking somewhat less cluttered. I've also settled into a bit of a stitching routine and am usually able to work on quilting for a hour or two each afternoon, and stitching for around two hours in the evening.  I have a quilt almost assembled so I'll so I hope to show that in my next post.  But the star of today's post is my progress on the Scottish Band Sampler (Scarlet Letter).  I'm nearly done with all those letters and the double running stitch around them.    The scalloped section below the letters is charted for eyelets.  I'm no...