TAST Weeks 4 and 6

I’m a little behind in posting our TAST stitches.  We’ve been too busy having fun!  There are books to be read, cookies to bake, things to knit, sunrises to track and photoperiods to calculate, and if that weren’t enough, the skating rink keeps beckoning.  Despite the distractions, we have been embroidering. However, I have been informed that I cannot show you B’s work.  She doesn’t like it, you see.  Feather stitch does not look like feathers, apparently, and if that weren’t insult enough, it is entirely too easy to turn what is supposed to be Cretan stitch into an alternating blanket stitch, and that will never do.  I believe her exact words involved rolled eyes, a hand resting on one out-thrust hip, and a very loud and sarcastically voiced “Fail!”  Which really meant “No, no, no, you cannot show my work this week, Mama, or last week’s work either.”

So I won’t.

But I can share with you a little bit of what I have been working on.  I’ve been continuing to work on several different pieces, as is my usual habit.  (Why have one project on the go when you can have half a hundred?)  First, I’ve continued adding seam treatments to a felt kit project that will be a Christmas wall hanging.  Last week, it gained an embellished Cretan stitch seam treatment.

I started with a burgundy Cretan stitch, then added black bugle beads.  I then added straight-stitch flower stems and seed bead flowers in various shades of green, and then finished it up with a row of chocolate brown sequins.

I’ve also put some more work into my landscape crazy quilt block.  The green velvet patch on the lower left corner was crying out for a flower garden, so I gave it one.

I had fully intended to make something out of TAST week 5’s herringbone stitch, but it never materialized.  Instead, there are detached chain stitch flowers in pink with brown french-knot cones (they are meant to be Echinacea).  There are clusters of french knots with fly-stitch stamens in burgundy and dark green. There are blue detached chain flowers that might be crocuses but aren’t quite.  There are button-hole wheels in navy blue, along with random scatterings of french knots in the same.  And then, there are the giant fly stitched turquoise flowers with couched stems and crazy dangling pistils.  There are more flowers to come, but somehow not a one of them wound up using herringbone stitch.  They were fun to stitch all the same.

I did manage to work in some TAST week 6 stitching. The diagonal seam above the garden has a base of Chevron stitch.  I based it on a seam embellishment pattern from Sharon B’s website (follow this link to see the stitch pattern). You’ll see that it takes a base of Chevron, adds a trio of detached chain stitches, a pair of straight stitches with a bead on the end, and then a sequin in the V of each Chevron stitch both top and bottom.

Sharon B’s example has the chain stitches forming a lovely extended diagonal line which I really, really liked. Too bad I didn’t notice I started doing the bottom set of them with the wrong slant half way through!  That’s what you get for stitching while watching TV, I suppose.  I didn’t bother picking out the mistake so you can see it in the photo below if you look carefully. The seam wound up covered by the garden of flowers, so it is somewhat camouflaged.

I’m enjoying the TAST challenge.  Watching B try stitches and abandon them gleefully for a wide variety of reasons is a source of great amusement.  She reminds me of her Auntie N when she does that.  It is a tendency towards impatience and imperfection that comes from a sense of adventurous creativity, strong self-confidence, and oodles and oodles of joyful abandon. I’m also enjoying expanding my repertoire of stitches, and the weekly reminder to do something new and different. But most of all, I’m finding myself fascinated by all the stitching that is posted in the comments of the TAST website each week. There are some truly phenomenally talented and creative people taking part in this challenge, and I am both humbled and awe-struck and inspired.

My knitting has been inspired this week, too…

Tomorrow, I’ll show you pictures of the itty-bitty thing that found its way onto my knitting needles while I was sitting in the waiting room at the doctor’s office yesterday.