Saturday Sampler: Winter Light Edition

If you've ever tried to photograph your needlework and achieve true fabric and thread color, you know how challenging it can be. May I recommend a blizzard for perfect lighting conditions? A blizzard provides ideal white light (white sky, white ground, white everything), so next time you need to do some stitchy photography, just dial one up.

This is my first finish of the year: Candy Cane Wishes by With Thy Needle & Thread, stitched on 28 ct. Mint linen. I used a Smyrna stitch (see my previous post) for the eyes and the holly berries, and GAST Picket Fence instead of the called-for Weeks Linen, and DMC 945 for his cheeks since it's only a few stitches. I also gave my snowman a happy little grin.

I've mentioned before that I'm slowly building my Cosmo stash. I'm so blessed to have a local quilt shop where I can just walk in and buy it (never had that before). Last spring I did a whole post about Cosmo threads and wrote about what I think is the major difference between Cosmo and DMC: the beautifully smooth, subtle transitions in color families. In that post, I had to use my Cosmo color card to illustrate my point, but I recently bought a nice handful of colors and can show you using full skeins. Look at how gorgeous! (Thank you, Mr. Blizzard.)

That post I linked also has some links to online shops that carry Cosmo threads, in case you now find yourself unable to go on unless you start your own collection. I know the feeling.

I also hit a post-Christmas sale at one of the Etsy shops where I have found very cute polymer clay needle minders.

Speaking of winter light, I have a new project ready to go on a lovely, sparkly, frosty fabric called Winter Winds. I think this is from Silkweaver, but I know nothing else about it, like whether it's still available. This is the only piece of Silkweaver fabric I own and I bought it at a shop in Virginia years and years ago. Yes, that's a biscuit counting pin. Biscuits are important.

I hit a snag with my Winter is Coming Quaker. One of the colors, GAST Garden Gate, is just not going to work. The color is used in the vase on the left border, the candlestick, the large center motif along the bottom, and the large motif on the right border. If you look closely at the pictures of the model, you can see the skein used has muted shades of grey-brown, beige, blue, and even a bit of olive. My skein is a flat, dark brown. I ordered additional skeins from two other shops, hoping to get a different dye lot, but nope. Flat, dark brown. Boooo. So I set to work trying to choose an alternative. Trying to choose colors online is the worst, but what can we do? I finally settled on GAST Fisherman's Wharf. In the photo below, the candlestick is stitched with GAST Garden Gate. You can see how dark it is, and how dark it would make the sampler. 

GAST Fisherman's Wharf has some brown, some blue, and some green, though more intense than what's used in the model. Will it work? No idea. I'll put in a couple of the smaller motifs and see what I think. I may have to take it out. Watch this space.

And finally, I made Tiger Lily a blanket fort, because blanket forts are awesome and honestly, why do we stop making them when we grow up? Now I want one.

That's the latest from the snowy Great Plains. Thank you to those who continue to offer kind words and prayers about my dad. He's still in a nursing facility and making progress, very slowly. He has also had his first dose of the vaccine, which is such a blessing in all of this. 

Happy Stitching, y'all!