Author Archives: jawilliams4

Aug17

Mt. Whitney Waterfall

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My first class ever with Lois Kershner, and it was wonderful! The piece is a photograph she took of a waterfall at Mt. Whitney, transferred to Congress cloth, and then stitched. LOTS of detail, and choices to be made about where stitched areas start and stop, and a fair amount of the dreaded random placement of things…think I’m getting over the all-too-common fear of random!

Lois is a wonderful teacher and her directions are wonderful, some of the best I’ve ever seen. I wish there had been more than two days for this class so I could have kept on stitching…it always seems like you get such a tiny amount done in class! But I have no doubt that I’ll be finishing this one. She also demonstrated the process of doing the photos transfer onto the canvas, so that we might try it with our own photos.

Here’s what my piece looks like after two days…

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Feb14

SOTM Progress

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I came home on Saturday and finished stitching the January and February installments…Although I’ve been feeling some regret at using colors similar to one of the provided color ways, especially after seeing what some of the other pieces look like, now that I’ve got more stitched, I’m really happy with how mine is looking!

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Jan22

Herringbone Happening Tip

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For those of you doing the Herringbone Happening piece, I thought you might be interested in what I came up with to make stitching a little easier.

The issue I had was figuring out where to END the bands…trying to follow the master diagram just wasn’t cutting it for me. Left to my own devices I would probably have stitched the corner squares before the bands, giving myself a clear sign about where to stop stitching the bands…but since I couldn’t do that, I basted a diagonal line from the corner of the large square in the upper left, down to the lower right. You can see the basting stitches. in the photo.

After pulling out two or three bands because I got the length/placement wrong, I was annoyed with myself for not thinking of the basting at the beginning!

herringbone-basting

Dec24

Christmas in SC

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I arrived to spend Christmas with Carol on Thursday, and by Saturday we were ready to shop. We set out early, met up with another of Carol’s stitching buddies, and drove to Atlanta.

The first shop we visited was the new Labors of Love. Carol and I have decided to stitch “Patchwork of Peace,” the American-flag-in-little-boxes piece that I think Margaret and Sylvia have already stitched, so we had a LOT of threads to search out! We decided to focus on the blue threads to start. Mark and Charlesy helped us pull the threads, and especially in my case, to find substitutions…because of course I decided to be different and stitch on Congress Cloth and not 18-count canvas. Imagine, we found ALMOST all the threads in one shop! And they special-ordered several that they didn’t have.

For anyone visiting Atlanta, we highly recommend that you visit Labors of Love! The shop is spacious and airy and the walls are lined with full ranges of many threads not always found in smaller shops. You want Dinky Dyes? How about those Threadworx overdyed Kreinik braids we had trouble finding for Autumn Kaleidoscope? They had them both…Burmilana? Bella Lusso? Yes and yes again. And Mark and Charlesy were knowledgeable about all the threads and very helpful. They even recommended someplace for lunch…but when we got there we couldn’t find parking so we headed over to the second shop on our list…

Nimble Needle is a smaller shop, but also carries a large thread inventory and walls full of painted canvases. We found a couple of the thread colors we hadn’t found at the first shop and I succumbed to an ornament canvas from the trunk show currently on offer. But frankly I was a little shopped out and didn’t spend as much time absorbing the surroundings as I might have otherwise. But this would also be a great destination for you if you visit Atlanta!

We ended up having lunch at an unassuming-looking barbecue place just a few shops down from Nimble Needle, and it was wonderful.

Both shops have off-street parking, always nice in urban settings.

Feb14

Another Kaleidoscope

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Since I wasn’t able to make it on Saturday, I thought I’d post about my progress. I wasn’t able to do section 4 because I don’t have one of the threads yet, but I’ve finished the rest. I made a little change in section 5 — after stitching it according to the instructions, I decided that there was too much of the canvas color showing, so I added horizontal laid stitches in the Kreinik, tucking them under the already-stitched crosses. I’m glad I did — it looks better with less canvas showing, and the increased amount of orange actually tones down the turquoise of the crosses. You can’t tell that in the photo, but in person the color really did change.

february