Election Day Start

The friend/blog reader who lives in the eastern time zone was the one who mentioned stitching Only One Rose by Hands Across the Sea and then I think I mentioned making it an Election Day SAL and we would come up with a SAL for every major election. I asked her if she wanted me to start at 11 p.m. last night since it would be midnight her time and, officially election day I suppose. She wasn’t sure she was going to stay up til midnight but I was anxious to get started.

I had my floss but had not chosen a linen. My linen is stored in tubs in the closet in the sewing room and Boots thinks choosing linen is great fun! I get the bin out that holds whatever count linen I’m going to use. As I remove a piece, Boots gets into the tub. I remove him, I tumble around to try to find another color that might work and Boots gets back in. Then when I have a couple of pieces of linen that I think might work, I spread the floss out and Boots slaps it around with his paws and then I try to send him out into the living room but he’d rather stay in there and help.

I try to choose fabric about mid-afternoon because Boots is sitting in the window watching bunnies and birds and not so interested in what I’m doing but it was late last night and he was determined to get his black fur all over whatever piece of linen I decided to use. This is where I tell myself it’s always nice to have a helper. 🙂

I have a peachy linen that I’ve been wanting to use. It may not be perfect but it’s what I’m going with . . at least for now. The linen is a monthly selection from XJu Designs and I love all her linen. The floss is Soie d’ Alger. I already had the chart and floss before my friend ever mentioned stitching it so it’s nice to be using something I already had and not ordering something new.

You can see that up in the left corner I ran a few stitches to see if this color floss was going to show up. There’s also a floss that’s very light off white but it’s surrounded by other stitches. There’s a pale gray that may not show up and I may end having to substitute it for something else but . . we’ll see.

I doubt I’m going to do the border on this piece. It’s satin stitched and, as of now, I’m not feeling like that’s something I want to do. Plus, it ends up being straight on the outside edges and with me doing my own framing, it’s much easier to make things appear straight if there’s not a straight border on the edge. The satin border is pretty and once this is finished, if I love it a lot, I may go ahead and do the satin border but for now, I’m not planning to do that.