A start delayed

For the past few months I have not had my usual raging, all-consuming stitchy bug. It's been a struggle to motivate myself to stitch. Back in early February, I became insanely excited about a Facebook SAL I found that is being hosted by Northern Expression Needlework. It's a 24-part SAL with a part released at the beginning of each month. I joined 6 months into the SAL. It's called the Learning Sampler and is chock full of specialty stitches.

The designer recommended using The Silk Mill silks (which I'd never even heard of before) and I could not resist! I immediately picked out my colours and ordered the silks from Europe.

The orginial design suggests an ombre range of colours, but I decided to go bold with the bright blue for the letters and and the two greens for the alternating bands. The off-white/cream is for the borders.

The silks are gorgeous! The smoothest, sleekest, shiniest silk I've ever worked with (and I work with silk often). Thankfully someone on the FB page had warned me how slippery this stuff is, and it certainly is slippery. Craziness … but SO pretty!

I started this piece with gusto, but in my head it was nowhere near this huge. Even after buying the massive piece of fabric (stitched over 2 on 32 ct lugana) it didn't register with me. It wasn't until I started stitching that I realized that I'd signed up for a huge, huge project. That realization kind of killed my bug. And the piece got set aside for a while.

Finally, after the rejuvenation of last week's stitchy get together with some friends, my bug is partially back, and I tackled this piece again. I was determined to finish the letter A. (I still need to finish B, C, D, and E and the top border just to complete part 1.)

Now that I have the desire to work on this again, I don't have the time. Story of my life!