The last year or two I have been enjoying stitching the occasional smaller project.  Something that I can pick up and put down without needing a lot in the way of frame, needles and threads.  It’s much better for those evenings spent curled up on the sofa, when I want to stitch but don’t want to concentrate so much.

I finished a few such pieces last year and although I talked about them on my youtube/flosstube videos I’ve never really blogged much about them.  This year I’ll try to share a few more of these smaller finishes.

The first finish in 2018 is the first part in a series of charts from Blackbird Designs called The Garden Club Series.  Part one is called Basket of Cherries.  I started it at the end of last year and finished on the 7th January, altogether I spent four evenings on this.  The series is designed to be stitched on different colour fabrics and then those fabrics are stitched together at the end.  I’ve opted for an easier approach (easier to finish anyway) of working on one piece of fabric.  I’m using a piece of 36 count linen from Barbaral Creations that I bought on Etsy, the colour is ‘Early America’ and is a nice warm brown with grey mottling.

I’m using the called for Gentle Arts threads and have not made any changes to the colours but because I am working over 1 on 36 count fabric I’m only using one strand of thread for the cross stitching.  This design also has some small bits of satin stitch and the basket has a lot of smyrna crosses.  The satin stitch is worked with one strand but I went over it to get the coverage that I wanted.  The smyrna crosses looked to thin in one strand so I changed to two strands for those and that has given them more body and added a texture to the basket.

I’ll be starting part 2 on Friday night.