Ellen Carr Changes

I have at least a partial plan about the changes I’m going to make to Ellen Carr 1843. I keep showing the chart cover so you can see what I’m talking about.

First, the urn and the flowers are close to perfectly centered. Somewhere along the way, something gets off centered because the line going under the text . . it’s longer on the right side than on the left side. I’ll figure that out later. It should be an easy fix.

Second, the house . . it’s about four stitches to the left. I cannot understand why it was done this way unless (1) Ellen Carr was a young girl when stitching and had no idea about centering or (2) There are two very short chimneys on the roof and they both needed to be stitched so they were in the peak of that zig zaggy border. If she had centered the house and still placed the chimneys where they are stitched, they would have run into the zig zag border.

What I did, and I’m still not 100% sure it’s going to work out, is I started the house, at the center and stitching in the center of the piece, and worked to the left. I came back and worked to the right. Then I went back and started the pink zig zaggy border in the center, worked to the left and am going back to the right. That should mean that the little short chimneys will end up where they need to be in relation to the pink border.

For anyone stitching this, I’m not sure why but the bottom left border, there are nine diagonal stitches leading up to the corner diagonal line. Everything else has 10 stitches. There’s room to make it like all the rest I think. Haven’t gotten that far yet.

The top left border . . it’s crazy but I’m leaving it as it is. It makes me smile. There were so many times when I was trying to figure out quilt borders that I almost did some crazy stuff to make things work and this corner reminds me of a lot of frustrating hours spent trying to make borders work. I can almost feel her frustration and finally, her relief in saying . . heck, with it . . this is how I’m leaving it! 🙂