The Sampler

Ugh I was sure it was ruined but the pen washed out! - PHEW!  Not that its moved since I washed the top half of it mind you.  Probably should remove it off the heated towel rail before someone dries their hands with it.  Although both hubby and Miss P wouldn't dare haha.  But Dad is probably coming for tea tomorrow and he would! haha.

Tea or Coffee?

Well I did as I said and randomly sewed together all my wee tea and coffee dyeing swatches.  I just needed to get moving on something, I was going crazy.  

I didn't think about it, I just paired them up into twos where they were about the same size, or at least the same length on one side.  Then repeated the process until I had a piece about A4 size and blow me down I kind of like them!

Now I had a cool piece of fabric (when I say cool as I generally stitch on plain white calico, anything thats not that is cool haha) what to do with it?    There was a doodle image that my eye kept getting drawn back to while I was trying to find something new to stitch.  
I thought it could be quite a good piece for using a pile of different stitches, sampler-esque even 😀.  Now usually when I look at these things and think 'yeah all different types of stitches' it never works out that way when I sit down to plan it out.  I'm sure it won't this time either.  But at least I know that going in right? 😀.  So I'm not going to put any pressure on myself to use a gazillion stitches, I'm just going to go with what takes my fancy at the time.   Its supposed to be fun, not stressful after all.

So I've got fabric, I've had my reality check about all the stitches I probably won't use.  While I like the original colour scheme, I don't think its going to work on my fabric, so I decided I'd stick with the tea and coffee theme and tried to match the darkest of the fabric colours to a DMC thread which I did and then I picked a few others in that range of colours.

Its not my usual colour scheme and it definitely has a lot of that very dark colour right now, but there is something about it that appeals.  As you can see I've got the design roughly drawn out on the fabric.  I haven't put it all on there, just the bigger bits, as I'll tweak it as I go so it works as an embroidery.

If nothing else,  I just feel so much better for having something to work on - yay!!!

Ta ta for now!