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.

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.

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.

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.