When I'm not beading ...

It's funny how you get into the habit of doing certain things in certain ways. For example, I can't do beadwork while sitting and watching television. It's just something about the location of the beads, the angle I'm sitting at ... I don't know. I have to be sitting at a table to do beading. One of my friends only ever beads when sitting in her recliner chair - we are all different!

Anyway, just because I can't do beading while I watch telly, doesn't mean I can't do anything. I can still embroider and crochet. I actually didn't do any embroidery for ages because I couldn't see well, but now I have my Craft Optic glasses and a fantastic new daylight lamp, I'm back in business.

I started work on a blackwork sampler in my embroidery class back in 2010 (http://www.crafteecottage.com.au/). I have been working on it sporadically ever since. I enjoy doing blackwork, but I did find some of the patterns very tedious to do, especially the large sections. I also struggled with doing this at night when I was tired before I got my craft optic glasses. Anyway, around Easter-time this year, I decided to really make a push to get this finished at last. It took a lot of work, but it was done by late July 2013 (3.5 years). There would be close to 400 hours of work in this, which includes quite a bit of pulling out and re-doing unfortunately. I got hung up on a couple of sections I didn't like and couldn't figure out what to do with - almost like writer's block! One night I sat down with a seam ripper and spent about three hours pulling out one section of stitching - I whinged to myself the whole time, but I felt so much better for having admitted that it needed to go!

This is the first sampler I have ever done and I can see a lot of faults in it, even though I am very proud of it. I want to do another one (yes I am a glutton for punishment), because I learned so much from this one and I would like to see how much better I can do.

I will have to get someone to take a decent photo of the sampler, these are terrible! But they give you an idea of what it looks like.

Lessons learnt:
Choose your main patterns at the start of the process and work out their repeat number of stitches, then plan your sampler around that. It's a minor niggle, but it does annoy me that the two lattice patterns don't go to the edge of the sampler.

Plan your layout, even a little bit, before you start. This sampler was very ad hoc - when I got bored with one section I would move on down to another section. So some of the stitches are not complementary to others, some should have have had wider or narrower bands. I left a blank section below the half-done alphabet and moved on to the next pattern, then had a lot of trouble finding a pattern that would fit in the space I left. I should have chosen a stitch and worked even a little bit, before moving on down.

Finally, if you're doing an alphabet, work out your spacing before you start. I didn't even try, I just copied the alphabet and spacings directly from the printed chart. That's fairly standard practice, I know. However, if I had been less lazy, I could have centred the alphabet so that there wasn't such a big gap at the end, which would have looked better in the long run.

Lots of lessons - the last one is: chip away at a big project and don't get discouraged. Don't feel bad for putting it away for a while, but do persevere. If you keep on with it, you will eventually finish! Maybe I should pull out that old Teresa Wentzler cross-stitch and have a go at that again?