Here is another piece of my sampler. The lilac band has smyrna stitches alternating whith the eye stitches. The aalgerian eye fillings are round eylet stitches with slightly diffenent other eyelets for filling the spaces in between. The diamond shapes are surrounded with running stitches and filled with one very big eyelet each.
Here is the next detail from my stitch along sampler. This is one of my favourite ones. I did algerian eye stitches with excentric holes in different combinations. The first square was done as the stitch diagram shows, for the other two a stitch went in every hole not in every second, and in the last one the wholes are in diffennt places, but I think this is easy enough to figure out. If not just ask.
This is the stitch diagram. Each little square represents a hole in the aida fabric (or any fabric). I did not number the stitches because there are many ways to do an eye stitch. I do them in one round, not in two, but that’s a matter of taste. I hope this is clear enough.
As promised, I’m starting to post details of my stitch along sampler. This is the top section. The two algerian eye stitch filling patterns in pink should be self-explanatory.
The green fillings are surrounded by mini-algerian eyes done with one strand embroidery floss over 4 aida squares in total. The variegated green filling is regular algerian eye stitch, starting at the top with 4 strands of floss and then one less until the last row, which is one strand of floss. For the solid green filling the same strengths of thread were used, but a weel spike was stitched into every hole of the aida.
I’m sorry for the unanounced blogging break. Every weekend I thought I’m going to write a couple of blog posts but just didn’t. I have a stressful job, and haven’t had any significant time off for 9 months, so I was kinda burned out lately. But now I have 2 weeks off and really hope to relax and get a few things done.
I did not completely abandon stitching, I worked on my sampler a bit on the commute. The thing is 1 meter long and a bit more than one third is done now. I didn’t do any stitches exept algerian eyes, a little bit arrowhead, a little bit smyrna stitch and many, many more variants of algerian eye. I’m obsessed with this stitch and don’t care that I am. I can always buy another length of aida band and do the others….
This was planned as a mere doodlecloth, strange how rhythm and style have crept in…
I think I will eventually post closeups of all the different pattern variations, but not right now. I think I’ll put this on hold for the vacation and work on things that are less portable and save this project for the daily commute.
please click on the pic to enlarge it
this is the beginning of my stitch along sampler
So time has proven TIF is kinda too much for me at the moment. All it does is make me start more wips I don’t have time or energy to finih really. Sorry for that. I know I have to stop being this haphazard. So i decided to sign up for something actually doable for me, that would be Sharon’s new challenge, stitch along. All you have to do is try out stitches from a list. I decided to do something really basic and quick this time. So I got 1 meter of this prefabricated aida band. I hemstitched both ends because on such a small scale, this is less of a hazzle than hauling out the sewing machine for me. On second thought, I should have done nun stitch and a fringe on the lower end, it’s on the list, after all. Well I still can undo the hem and go this route if I really want to.
This is not going to be a real sampler, more of a doodle cloth. Probably I’ll roughly do the stitches alphabetically, but I’ll leave out the pulled stitches for now and everything else that doesn’t work on Aida. Also I might leave out stitches I have explored in depth before. This is about learning, not about showing off I guess.
Well, here is the to end. I wahted to stitch “stitch along” on top, then realized that this might be an unfair case of starting early, since chain stitch is on the list either.
Tenar's cave 