Embroidery Again...
A Couple of Months ago, Dear Readers, a co-worker at the School where I work, the Fiber Arts Teacher, brought me a gift because she knew I had an interest in dollhouse miniatures. It was a very old and out of production kit for an oriental carpet in petit-point made by the House of Miniatures back in the eighties. My eyes lit right up! Wow! What a beautiful design! It was amongst a whole pile of boxes full of cloth and yarns donated by an elderly woman who had been a crafter for years but was moving to an assisted living home and needed to down size her supplies.
It's an old style chart with only the symbols
because it predates color copying.
The fabric itself was printed with a rough guide of color placement...
And it only had a small amount of stitching which had been done
and needed to be carefully undone.
The woman had not been experienced
and the stitching was not done right.
The only difficulty was that the original yarns for the kit had been lost
and were no longer with the rest of the pieces.
I was sure I could probably find some yarns that would work!
But when I started to hunt for appropriate yarns,
I was discouraged to find that local shops didn't carry the proper weight yarn...
and figuring out colors on-line was going to be a real challenge.
I mentioned this difficulty to my friend and she said
she thought she'd seen some yarns in the boxes
that might be the missing pieces.
I went to look and sure enough....
there were the yarns!
Yay!
Such beautiful colors!
And I never would have known how much to buy!
You can imagine that I began to stitch
as soon as I could get the cloth on my frame!
It is taking a little getting used to stitching on a printed cloth!
Fortunately, the instructions warn you that
the colors might not exactly match where they should be stitched.
It is too tricky to get the cloth threads to match the printing exactly.
So you still need to count very carefully to determine the correct placement.
And the other tricky aspect of the chart is that
it is only printed for one quarter of the carpet!
You need to "reverse" the images for the other quarters!
I am gradually getting the hang of it.
And because the chart is hand drawn....
It has a few errors too....
places where the color doesn't match what is on the cover picture...
or stitches are missing altogether!
But I'm told that this is part of the fun of the genuine Oriental rugs...
they have small "imperfections" in the patterns and colors!
So if I leave something out or get the placement a little wrong...
It just adds to the authenticity!
I am just Loving this pattern!
Especially once you start to get the contrast
with the dark background colors!
And because I am sure you will want to know
that I did complete the stitching of the little cushion...
I thought I would show you both together!
(I still have to stitch the pillow to its backing...)
Here you can see the completed cushion close up.
I think I like the way the colors turned out
better than the original design would have been!
So that's what I have been playing with, Dear Readers,
a new (Old) Embroidery Project!
