Earlier this year I posted how my current embroidery project
was coming along. I was able to stick
with working on it regularly until about the beginning of April when I began
preparations for attending Samford and cross-stitch took a backseat in my life.
When I got back from Samford, I thought that I would take it
up again, but about a month later the unpredictability of life reared its head
and I couldn’t do much with it until nearly two months later. Since returning to this project I’ve been
able to devote the better part of my weekends to stitching on it and have even
at times kept a journal of the amount of time spent cross-stitching on it.
The project is on of my fairly short list of 2012 New Year’s
resolutions and hopefully if I’m able to complete a resolution this year, this
will be the one. Earlier this year, I
had been hoping to complete the picture this summer and enter it into the
county fair, but after weathering a bit of chaos in my life, I see that I was
deluding myself.
I very pleased with how the stitching coming along. The magnifier is working out very well. However, when I moved it from the top scroll
bar to one of the sidebars, I noticed that it had discolored the fabric
some. Thankfully, the dis-colorization
is only on the wrong side of the fabric so it’s not visible from the
front.
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| Stitching progress since 14 October 2012 |
On a previous project years ago, I did experience the fabric
getting stained from a clamp or something that held the scroll frame in
place. The stains did come out when I
applied bleach to the affected area with a cotton swab. Just call me the cross-stitching
Heloise! Thankfully, that hasn’t
happened to me with this project and it’s interesting that when things seem to
go wrong with projects, it’s the ones that you plan to give to other people.
I’m still having issues with flecks of the linen coming off
onto the stitched areas. I’m still
thinking this is just a ‘feature’ or bug as they say in the computer world when
working with linen.
The project does have some DMC brand metallic floss in
it. This is always a challenge to
stitch with. Thankfully, there are only
fairly small amounts of this being used in the picture, but the funny thing is
the more that I study the pattern, the more areas that I can point out as being
stitched with the dreaded metallic floss.
As I was working with it today, I considered stitching the other areas
that require the metallic floss just so that I could get it over with. Sort of how one might approach walking
across hot coals, their annual prostate exam, mammogram, or Pap test.
I will say that the DMC brand metallic floss isn’t
completely awful to work with at least in comparison to others. The metallic flosses or filaments that gave
me the most grief were the ones that came with kits, so I could never be sure
where the manufacturer got their stuff from.
I think the worst were in kits from Bucilla and Leisure Arts. Both companies have beautiful patterns and wonderful
kits, but they need better quality control of the metallic flosses and filaments
that are included in them. In the past,
my first exposure to metallic floss was when working a project that required
a Kreinik brand metallic floss. This
wasn’t horrible to work with, but did require a lot of patience and attention
to manipulating the floss so that it laid flat on the fabric.
