Inspiration and a new blog on my bloglines account

Update: Yes! Things are working again. I don’t understand but it was something between my browser and the blog software. I just relaxed and followed instructions. So photos are now added. If you haven’t been over to see the butterflies that Annie at Annies Crazy World has been making, please, do take a look. She not only shows her beautiful seam treatment, but also how to make the butterflies.

And Gayle, please forgive me for misspelling your name earlier. I am so sorry. I just now caught it–of course, having the spell checker helped. But I do know better, especially since one of my very dear cousins back east is named Gayle.

Judith at Spinningyarns is new on my blogline account. She has recently started blogging. Already I’ve been clicking way and finding interesting things from the links on her posts as well as enjoying her own needlework on the crazy quilt that she has started. In case you’re wondering about the name Spinningyarns, she spins her own silk and that lead to her rekindled interest in embroidery. She also enjoys flower gardening and has snapped a few pictures of her plants that she posts at Everything in the garden’s Rosy…. And as you may know I love flowers so I stop there, too.

As far as inspiration is concerned, that’s what I encountered when I came rushing into the TSTC flickr account and found this sampler by Gayle of stichintime. I could not get the last row out of my mind. From the moment I saw it, I felt like it was a special interpretation of this stitch and so inspiring to me. Gayle has done other great samplers and recently did a columbine plant that very special.

Pre update paragraph: No pictures! Yes, I’m so sorry. My “send to editor” button will not work to upload pictures on to this post. I’ll be updating later in the day, if it becomes available. Second major problem this morning is that other photos are still on my card because Photoshop Elements won’t recognize my card and thinks there is nothing in the drive. I’m going to be working on the problem and will either do a separate post or add with the first photos on this post. Last time this happened it was as simple as buying an new card holder. In the meantime, I hope you’ll enjoy Judith’s and Gayle’s blogs with their photos.

New Updated area: When I wrote Gayle asking permission to post and so forth. She wrote me back saying, she, too, had been looking at that row and wondering what it would look like stacked or spaced differently. And as I explained to her that’s all I did with it when I played around with it. And I’m hoping as time allows she will be able to follow up on some of her ideas, too. Since she is the one who made that sampler, I think her ideas will flow much more freely and more fully than any thing I can do here.

Here it is side by side and stacked

Side by side and stagger (brick) stacked

Tips touching and what a nice darning pattern it could have been, too.

I just love think about the patterns that could be made if these were grouped together in various arrangements! I wish I’d had more time to stitch this out. And this next one, too.

The photo give you a little idea of what happens when one of these concepts is stitched out. Please forgive me for not hidding the threads. There is the small white diamond as in the third photo (I just hid the riding tie downs) Then there is diamond made of the thread from the five stitches placed together, on the right hand side the large diamond from four cluster of the five stitches and on the left the large white diamond around the small diamond of five stitches together. Well, you can tell I’m excited. I don’t know if I’m talking sense in a way that anyone else can understand. Sometimes you just have to ignore me! I want to stitch some more of these out in the next few weeks as time allows and if it doesn’t I’m going to put them in my pattern software and save them for future reference.

Here’s a much simpler idea I tried to stitch out.

Then I played with the inversion (I hope that the correct word for the concept) of the straight stitches with these results.