I really must apologize … I meant to blog about my class at The Enriched Stitch in Wilton, CT over the weekend.  But, as usual, I got involved in other things.

Saturday, if you remember, was a horribly rainy day.  Driving up to Wilton was something of a challenge but the class at the end of the trip was well worth it.  The shop is on two floors with downstairs for canvases, threads and all of the accessories you can imagine while upstairs is devoted to classroom space.   I of course didn’t take pictures of the shop (I seem to have some sort of phobia about taking shop pictures), but you can view some photos on the shop’s website www.enrichedstitch.com.

Once we all dried out, the fun began.  Mary Susan is a wonderfully patient teacher not only sharing her thought process in picking the stitches and threads, but demonstrating stitches as we went along.  We started on the door wreath, which is stitched in Colonial Knots with Painters Thread.  My knots are generally somewhat haphazard – sometimes beautiful and sometimes pretty pathetic.  Mary Susan demonstrated (repeatedly) how to make perfect Colonial Knots and then we practiced with some embroidery floss before tackling the actual wreath.  Painters Thread is also something I’ve never used, so right out of the box I learned a new technique and used a new thread.  Painters Thread has gorgeous names – we are using Turner for the wreath and Kandinsky for the sky – the package says it is a YLI Ribbon Floss Shimmer dyed thread.

Here you can see the beginnings of my wreath.  We jumped around with the Colonial knots so that the color would be more random.

We then moved on to the moon which is stitched with a Threadworx Fine Braid.  The stitch is very interesting – eyelet stitches of different shapes and sizes.  We all thought the eyelets looked like the craters of the moon; it’s a very interesting effect. Next up was the snow on the roof.  I posted the full canvas picture on Facebook and the stitch for the snow got a number of comments.  It is a Diamond Pavilion Stitch in Silk N Colors Mint Frost with a Walnetto in Sparkle Braid (thank you, Michael Boren and Carole Lake!) in between and a Myuki Bead in the center of the Walnetto.  Absolutely fabulous!

We talked about the various other stitches and then wrapped up the afternoon working on the sky.  It is a Bargello pattern done in five different threads as well as an empty row.  The order of the threads varies throughout the sky.  Some of my fellow stitchers do not care for empty canvas so they will eliminate the empty row.  We were given a pattern to follow but I went out on a limb and actually developed a random pattern.  The compensation around the lettering was discussed at length and I will approach it with caution.

Here you can see my roof snow and the sky pattern as well as the canvas at the end of the class.

Mary Susan had her canvas finished as a stand-up music box.  The finished product is gorgeous and such a clever way to finish a piece.  I am probably going to have mine finished similar to an ornament so that it can be displayed on an easel. I know you are all shocked that I’m not thinking about framing it!

Here are pictures of the music box.  Isn’t that finishing just fabulous?  You can buy the music box through the internet so you get whatever music you like.

I am taking some time off over the holidays and I hope to catch up on some of my in-progress projects before I get started on more new projects in the New Year.  And so maybe you will see some progress on this (and other) projects in 2015. Until then …