Progress

For me besides making progress on the sampler that I am working on at the moment, I have also made very good progress on the undecorating. Today I can say that the last box for the Carolers has been located and the last of the Carolers tucked away till next I decorate. I also was able to clear all the Christmas off our kitchen table...nice to have it clear and ready for everyday use. Finding boxes meant that I also found everyday decorations that had to be put back in their places. I have started working on getting everything back to normal. I did several trips up and down the stepladder to put items over the kitchen cabinets...but did finally put a hault to the climbing...I had just had enough. So several items that need to go up are residing on the kitchen counter. I think that I will wait to put them up till all are out and I can make decisions as to where each should be placed. I am now down to items on the dining room table and the number there are thankfully deminishing. Now all that reside there are odds and ends...some laggard angels, snowman, trees, and other misc. items that still need me to find a place to put them to store them away. At least I can see progress. Today a lot more progress was made with the leaf raking by Woody with a lot of help from the neighbors (Nathan, Kathy and perhaps a grandchild or two). Woody also helped the girls practice softball. He pitched to them for a while. Joy and Esther have signed up for softball this year. They have try outs tomorrow. Since they got introduced to baseball first (since there was no softball during Fall Ball), they don't know much about softball. For part of my breaks from undecorating today, I worked some more on my sampler. I have moved on to the next large band and am now doing the outlines that I will fill in with satin stitch. This is a reproduction of a sampler stitched in England in 1699. Ten to fifteen years ago Colonial Williamsburg acquired this sampler to add to their collection of samplers that is housed in the Dewitt-Wallace Museum. A little more than ten years ago, Woody and I arranged to go on a private tour of the samplers and were shown the samplers that are stored in special drawers and aren't on display to the public most of the time to protect the from the light. We got to see the actual sampler of this reproduction...the thing that stood out about it was that the colors were still, after hundreds of years, very vivid. Our guide told us that kits to make reproductions of this sampler had just arrived and were now on sale in their museum gift shop. Well, I was VERY interested and ended up buying the kit. Another special thing about the sampler kit is that the reproduction was done by Joanne Harvey. I had had the privilege of studying under Joanne many years before in Plymouth, MA, when a friend and I went to Plymouth to learn how to do 17th Century embroidery and began the Loara Standish Sampler (which is totally reversible). So working on this sampler is bringing back memories both of Williamsburg and Plymouth. Joanne is very accurate in her reproductions so I was very glad to have another of her samplers to work on. This one is not as difficult as the Loara Standish sampler (oldest known American sampler)but it is still tedious...it is done on 40 ct. linen (that's 40 threads per inch) and it is worked over three threads. Most of the time when working on linen one works over two so it takes a bit of "thinking" to go over three...though I did go over three for Loara's sampler, too, so it hasn't been too hard to get back into that habit. This one isn't done reversible...except for the double running stitch (the outline that I am working on now). It takes quite a bit of thinking to work out the path to make sure that all places are covered on the back too. On the Loara sampler Joanne gave us drawings with the path that we were to take...we called them "dot-to-dots." But for in this sampler's instructions ( there are no road maps except for one of the bands...not sure why that one was given and no others...but I am plugging along and doing the best that I can. I have finally given in to doing only small areas at a time...I just can't do it for a large area and end up being accurate. One of the things that makes it difficult is that the threads are thick and thin in the linen weave...and it is easy...even under magnification (I stitch under a powerful Dazor magnification lamp)...to miss one of those thin threads every so often and get the whole pattern off kilter...I have taken out quite a few stitches on this sampler trying to find those elusive thin threads that messed me up! At least doing small areas I catch my mistakes more quickly when things don't line up. Well, enough about stitching which is probably not of much interest to most of you...though I do have a few followers that will understand what I am talking about...one being the friend who went to Plymouth with me and another being a fellow needleworker who resides in AZ, who I first met on the internet in a sewing chat room and later met in person when visiting in AZ. And, there are several other internet stitcher friends who come in periodically to check the blog...so perhaps at least there will be several that I haven't completely bored! Woody did get his four-mile walk in late this afternoon. It has been a beautiful spring-like day here in Middle Tennessee. We are now settling in for another quiet Friday evening. I'm going to go watch a rerun on my iPad and perhaps put in a few more stitches.