I’ve had these two on my GK wishlist for ages. The one of the womanreading is very personal to me because I’m studying for a degree in English Literature and this is my idea of the ultimate non-stitchy relaxation. However, I didn’t know why I was so drawn to the cat – it just seemed vaguely familiar for some reason. They hadn’t been in any of the regular GK sales and I was about to cave and buy them at full price when – hurrah! – they were both reduced in the Thanksgiving sale! I was so pleased, I texted pictures of them to Mum and she asked me what drew me to these particular designs, which struck me as an odd question. It turns out that the reason the cat was vaguely familiar to me is that years ago (I’m talking decades) Mum had a birthday card with this design on it that she loved so much she framed it and had it on display in her work room at home. Over the years it faded so she asked an artist who lived next door if he could paint a replica of it for her. The artist wasn’t exactly the reliable type – he never painted the picture and Mum never got the card back. Mum told me this story over the phone and although she would never ask outright, I could tell from the tone of her voice that she would love nothing more than to have the cat stitched and displayed in her work room again. So, having sworn to myself that after finishing the wolf for Dad I’d never stitch another big project as a gift … guess what …
Yep, I’m going to do the cat for Mum. This leads me to the second part of my post. I have loads of DMC threads that I’ve bought to kit up patterns that I’m not likely to stitch in the foreseeable future because they’ve been usurped in my (and Mum’s!) affections by other designs. This means I have a number of bags of threads, many of which are the same colour but from different batches. I want to organise them into one big stash of threads in number order so that I can kit up the cat and other future projects from the threads I already have and only buy the threads I still need. So my question is this: Is the number at the end of the barcode on the DMC label a batch number? As you can see from the picture below, the number at the top of the barcode is different even though both skeins are DMC 310. Can I assume that if I store all my e.g. 310s together, I can avoid clashing batches in a project by making sure that for each project I only select threads with the same number at the end of the barcode? Or does that number relate to something else entirely and have nothing to do with batches?
I love the story about the cat picture....not the part about losing the original picture, but the rest of it.
I don't know about the numbers. I looked on a bunch of skeins I have within reach. The 310s have different numbers, but I found only one other color that has the number string on it. None of the other skeins in this bunch that I'm looking at have a number string, they just have a single digit number that looks like the last digit of the bar code. If it were a dye-lot, wouldn't all the colors have it?
It looks like the two 310s in your picture are different colors, but maybe it's a trick of the lighting. For a heavy-confetti design, it doesn't matter so much if the dye-lots don't match exactly. It is noticeable if you have a solid area of that color and you change dye-lots in the middle of it, but confetti hides subtle differences like that. If the 310 is one color in a blend, I wouldn't worry about dye-lots at all. If you're concerned and the 310 isn't blended with another color, you can use two skeins of 310 and blend one thread from each. Of course, I'm assuming you're doing a 2-over-1 tent.
I'm with Ally on the blending.Dyelots are different regardless of the fact that DMC swears otherwise.
I remember when I was working in my LNS a lovely old gent was using a huge amount of 310 end he found eight,yes eight different dyelots and it was noticeable on his stitching.
Marilyn in SE Queensland
"People who hate cats will come back as mice in their next life."
Stitchinkitty wrote: Dyelots are different regardless of the fact that DMC swears otherwise. I remember when I was working in my LNS a lovely old gent was using a huge amount of 310 end he found eight,yes eight different dyelots and it was noticeable on his stitching.
I agree. They can absolutely be different and no one can convince me otherwise. In many cases, you can just hold the two skeins side-by-side and you can see the color difference. I found a bonanza of floss and silks and other specialty threads in a storage bin that I had forgotten about. I sorted the DMC and added it to my stash. Some of the colors looked the same, but some were very noticeably different. They can swear all they want; I know what I see.
If you can't be sure of getting the same dye-lot and you need to fill a large area, I would use a strand from each skein and 'blend' the color, and I might stitch the area in an arc instead of straight rows or by blocks. If the skeins are different dye-lots and you might need more than two skeins, if you stitch in arcs instead of rows or blocks, any color difference won't be distracting because you don't have straight lines where the colors change.
I did one and bought 2 skiens together having used all of one i started on the second and it was as obvious as a slap in the face with a cold kipper! went and bought 2 more and they still looked off to me so undid over a 1000 stitches and redid it blending the 2 new skeins as i went, its not that hard to do and certainly better to spend a few moments doing that than undoing and restitching.
LOVE the tale of the kitty and so meant to be done for your mum the other one is so relaxing to look at i shall look forward to seeing you do these.
