Monthly Archives: September 2014

Passione Ricamo M04 Mystery SAL – Under the Moonlight

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Passione Ricamo is going to have a new Mystery SAL. This time it is called “Under the Moonlight” and the fabric suggestions you get when have paid to participate seem to be coloured to look like the night sky. I really like Passione Ricamo’s “The Night” pattern, and I am hoping this is along the same lines, but most of their patterns are very lovely and the SAL is not very expensive.

You can sign up at the Passione Ricamo website for € 12,90 and you receive a document with all the materials required to stitch the pattern. The first part will be sent out on November 3, 2014 and I assume that is the end of the sign-up period as well.

 

I decided to purchase a fabric and the special materials from the Crafty Kitten where you also get a 10% discount on a fabric for the pattern. I decided to use 32 ct Jobelan in Twilight Shadows. The DMC floss I ordered from 123stitch.com

I have never managed to keep up with the previous Mystery SALs, but I have always gotten my materials late, so I am hoping to be ready to start when the first part comes out and maybe keep up with the parts.

 

Waiting for my first Châtelaine kits

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On August 18 I placed an order for two smaller Châtelaine kits from the European Cross Stitch Company. On my order, I tried to add an extra piece of fabric for another project. I got an automated reply that my order had been recieved, but I got no confirmation or price for my special request. I also did not receive the PDF charts I had ordered for a long time. As I felt that I wanted some feedback on my order I contacted the European Cross Stitch Company with some questions. I got a swift and friendly reply where Cindy told med that they don’t process orders for charts before the rest of the order is ready to send out, and that my extra piece of fabric had been added to my order.

Two things confuse me about this practice:

1. Most, if not all, Châtelaines calls for DMC threads as well as all the special materials. You can find the required materials on the Internet, but I would prefer to look at the actual chart when ordering these threads to avoid errors. As I live in one of the most expensive countries in the world I usually order materials online, and when the materials for a Châtelaine finally arrive I want to be ready to start. It takes a while for an Internet order to arrive, so I want to place it as soon as possible.

2. When I make a special request on an order I really want a confirmation that it has been received, whether it is possible to fulfill and the price, even if I don’t ask for this specifically.

The whole point of this rant was actually to say that I received my two PDFs in my inbox on September 15! I assume this means that my materials have been shipped from the European Cross Stitch Co. (no e-mail with information about this either). I didn’t want to pay for the express delivery, so I don’t expect a tracking number, but a “Your package has been shipped”-e-mail would have been nice. Anyway, I read through all the instructions carefully and tried to figure out the pattern at once. I can’t wait for the materials to arrive. Normally this takes from 1 to 3 weeks: 1 week in the USA, 1 day to cross the Atlantic and an unknown amount of time at customs. When it clears customs the package should be at my post office the next day.

Tree of Stitches – September 12, 2014

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I didn’t want to wait any longer to start this and jumped in. I had quite a bit of leftover fabric from when I bought material for the Passione Ricamo 20 Years Celebration, so I cut off a piece for the Tree of Stitches. It is a 32 ct Permin linen in white.

At the beginning of the instructions it is states that “You will need to make sure you have enough of each colour, especially if you choose variegated threads” but there is no indication of how much you will actually need. I asked on the designer’s Yahoo Group “The Stitch Specialists” about the floss usage and got some useful answers, but for the most part they were not useful. The most common was “it depends on your stitching/your thread choice etc”. I know that the amount of floss used depends on the way you stitch but all I wanted was to know if I needed to buy more than one skein for the tree’s branches. As I couldn’t get any answer on the group I redrew the whole chart into PCStitch and looked at the floss usage. Based on this I bought 1 skein each of these Waterlilies: 66 Jade, 152 Mulberry and 189 Gingersnap. I also bought 1 card of Rainbow Galleries PB52 Lighter Green. This is a floss toss of all the materials.

Tree of Stitches - Floss Toss 1

The pattern also calls for beads, but I haven’t decided what I want to use yet.

I was really excited to start, so I jumped in and started on the tree’s trunk. I have never used variegated threads before so it took me a while to get comfortable with having to finish each stitch, so progress was a bit slow, but after three evenings it was finished.

Floss used: Waterlilies 189 Gingersnap cut into 1 yard lengths. I used 4 strands from one length and 2 strands of 1/2 length. This adds up to 10 strands of a 1/2 yard lengths.

Part 1 - Trunk

Part 1 - Trunk Detail

I was so excited to have finished the trunk that I jumped right into Part 2 – Smyrna Stitch. These were not very complicated, so I finished the first branch the same evening. I used 1 strand of 1 yard of Waterlilies 66 Jade to finish this branch. I am not sure about the coverage, but I will wait and see how the tree develops.

Part 2 - Whole tree

Part 2 - Detail

I have decided to skip Part 3 French knots for the moment and continue with Part 4 – Eyelets. I have never liked french knots so I want to procrastinate, and I think the placement will be easier when the second branch is in place.

Floss organizers

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A while ago I bought a bunch of StitchBow Floss Holders from DMC when I was kitting my HAED Teddy Bear Stocking. The pattern calls for so many different colours that it required proper organization of the floss. I also bought a couple of the large plastic wallets that take 15 StitchBows. I am quite happy with the StitchBows, but I find the plastic wallets unpractical. It is difficult to put the StitchBows back in their pockets and the binder becomes too space demanding and hard to manage when it is open. I really wanted some kind of box that gave me a better overview of my stash. So I spent a couple of hours searching the Internet.

I first discovered that DMC used to make a box for StitchBow storage, but it is discontinued, so my search continued. After a while I found an online cross stitch store in South Korea that had exactly what I was looking for. The shop is called Yeidam Cross Stitch. They had plastic boxes that could take 100 StichBows each. The boxes can be seen here.

I have to admit that I was sceptical of ordering from South Korea, and the payment method was not very good. But the boxes weren’t very expensive, so I decided to take risk, and potentially eat the loss, and I ordered five boxes. That should be enough for the entire DMC line with room to spare.

It turned that I had worried needlessly and the boxes arrived in good condition. They took a while to arrive, but I believe the delay can attributed to transport and customs control.

when I first got the boxes I only had the materials for the HAED Teddy Bear Stocking and the first Passione Ricamo mystery, and I kept each kit in a seperate box.

This is a photo of my kit for the Passione Ricamo Fairy Mystery SAL 2012-2013. I removed the inside tray to make room for the bead jars, but I didn’t really need the tray for this one so it was not a problem.

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This is a photo of the thread for the HAED Teddy Bear Tree Stocking. I managed to fit all the floss in one box. It was a tight fit, but I got it all in and I find it a lot easier to use than the binder and plastic wallets.

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I have since bought more materials and I have found that I ended up using a little bit of one skein and a little bit of another one in the same color for another project, and this annoyed me as well as made it impossible to keep track of what I have. I have now put all my DMC into the boxes in numerical order. If a pattern calls for several skeins of one color over a large area, like a background, I will buy the skeins for that and keep them with the project, but for everything else I just use from the boxes. This is what they look like now.

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Yeidam also has smaller boxes, and I considered buying them for smaller projects, but for the moment I don’t see the need. I bought a DMC Gold Series StitchBow roll recently and I think it will serve my needs for transporting a project and if I want to keep a kit seperated I just use a ZipLock bag.

The only drawback of using the StitchBows is that I have not found a good way to keep leftover threads, so currently I just keep each thread in a small ZipLock with the number tag from the skein. This means that I can re-use the bags later for other threads, but it might get to chaotic and will need a revision later.

As I have recently bought my first silks I think I will use Floss-a-Way bags for those, but I have not made a definite decision yet.