A Loss and a New Beginning

Something horrible has happened: I forgot my tast sampler in the train to work, and gone it was. Gone the months of work, and the material proof of all I learned during this time. This really put me off embroidery and blogging for a while, but I guess that’s life.
I’m sorry for whining, and for not letting you know earlier why I’m silent.

Anyway, I could not bring myself to continue with tast where I was forced to leave it, so I abandoned the challenge for this year. I collect all the stitches ans since there won’t be a new challenge next year I’ll try again from the beginning then.

Of course, I did not abandon stitchery. I did the finishing toughes on two old things you’ll see soon, and I started to faff arround with blackwork. Mary Corbert has posted a bunch of free blackwork patterns here and here, I used them to have a go at blackwork. I have no idea how the finished piece will look.

It is stiched on light yellow linen I got at a deco fabric shop. I don’t think it’s perfect evenweave but close enough. It was labelled 100% linen but was to cheap for that and feels more like cotton. Never mind, it feels good and looks nice. By now I have gone back to the shop and bought more of the fabric, both in that yellow and white.

The threads are machine stitching cotton 30, machine stitching cotton 12 and a silk sewing thread that in in between in strength, all in brown. When I was shopping for thread they were out of black, can you believe this? I was angry about this but now I think the brown on yellow looks very good. They are more smooth and are easier to work with than one strand of floss, but more expensive.
The pic is not that good, my scanner doesn’t like hard contrasts, I had to photoshop it heaviely to make it look brown and yellow instead of dark and off white.