A New Start – Strawberry Manor

My plan, as I mentioned yesterday, was that I was going to get back to work on Love is the Key by Teresa Kogut. I had it all stacked in my chair so when I got up yesterday morning, I was going to start stitching.

I may have mentioned that Teresa Kogut is having a Stitch Along for members of Tier 4 of her Patreon group. The chart is called Strawberry Manor. She had done a live chat Tuesday evening and the planned start date for the SAL was June 25 or 26 . . I can’t remember. She said if she got the first clue done earlier, she’d release it to us earlier.

The first thing I do each day is read my email. Well . . Teresa Kogut got everything ready and Part 1, along with the entire border, was in my email so that meant . . I was starting on that.

I had ordered silk floss from Victoria Clayton so I had all that but I had not decided on a fabric. I pulled out as much linen as I could carry into the bedroom and spread it all out on the bed.

Quite a few people are using Grandma’s Slip by XJu Designs (bottom right) and several are using Aged Hazelnut (right side, middle row). That one is also by XJu Designs.

After tossing some floss around on the different fabrics, I decided to go with Duxbury by Fox & Rabbit. It isn’t even in that batch of fabric. I had already taken out six or eight pieces that I thought wouldn’t work and Duxbury was one of those but I kept coming back to it. Duxbury is one of those fabrics that has parts of it that are very mottled and some calmer parts. I love the overall piece but decided to open it up and see if there were calm parts, as well as very busy parts. There were some calm sections that I think will be perfect!

I think all of the floss colors will work nicely with the fabric colors.

As I as searching for the area on my piece of linen that I wanted to use, I found these spots.

See a resemblance??

I’ll be surprised if all three spots make it into the actual stitching area but that’s the part I’m using.

A bit of stitching was done last night but not too much. I won’t have much stitching time today but I hope to get a bit done on it.