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Golly, Mabel, these sure look great!

Hi Mabel

Goes without saying I think your work is superb: I esp like the hardanger minis mounted on metallic foil cards, the effect is quite lovely. I have seen you use these before. Do you mind me asking where you got the card blanks from, or perhaps you bought the sheet card and made the cards yourself?

Fabulous design, Mabel! You should start selling them!

Jane, the cards came with a magazine some time ago, so i don't know where you could get them from.

Agi, I've been playing with that idea myself but I wouldn't know where to start!

Mabel Figworthy wrote:tiffstitch, at the moment I'm just charting ideas for bands -- some of them may end up not being used at all, some I may use twice, who knows , and I haven't worked out the order yet.

Once I've charted them all I wall print them, cut them out as individual bands, and then play with them until i think the order looks right. One thing I am fairly sure about is that I want to alternate bands of ribbon work and bands of hardanger/satin stitch.

That sounds like a great idea. I'm interested to see your further designs. You already have an excellent start, I had thought you were done designing already!

Your charting looks great Mabel. The third band were you planning beads or some other stitch. When I looked it did look as though it was twinkling at me.

I've redone the pics of the bands so that they are all equally wide, so it will be easier to do my cut-out-and-try-every-possible-combination bit. However that meant the links don't work anymore, so I'll post them again, especially as I've done a bit more.

One of the things I needed to do was to devise a way of charting all the ribbon work in a program that was designed to chart cross stitch and backstitch with a bit of cut work. Another problem with using this for Hardanger (to be stitch on 28ct evenweave) is that the symbols for beads are far smaller than the beads will be in reality -- I'll have to bear that in mind !

Anyway, please imagine all the beads rather bigger than they look, and here is the key to the ribbon stitches:



Charts in the next post.

The bottom will be like this:



topped by a "shaped" ribbon band:

And the bands:








There's also a band of pulled four-sided stitch, but that doesn't look very interesting as a chart

I did have fun trying to work out the size of an average spider web rose, gathered stitch and ribbon french knot, then working out how many threads that would cover on 28ct ct, and therefre how many lines I could cover in the charting program Sometimes pencil and paper is just easier...

maggs, you asked about the "twinkles" in one of the bands -- I had to have another look as i couldn't remember designing any ! You're right, the fourth band down looks as though it has little starry bits, but I think it's just an optical illusion where the fabric shows through. There are beads in that band but they are coloured, 2 shades of pink and two shades of green.

that is VERY pretty Mabel! I really am looking forward to watching this come to be

Wow! That is going to be a stunning piece - I can't wait to see it stitched!

Kell, I've been meaning to ask you as you design such a lot -- do you stitch everything as and when you design it, or do you sometimes design things which don't actually get stitched?

There are loads of my designs I haven't got round to stitching just yet and I know I'll not stitch all of them, although I plan to stitch quite a few!

I really fancy stitching my Quaker cushion as I have a nice piece of 11-count pink aida that would work up a treat, and I think most of my subversive samplers will get stitched at some point too.

A little in-betweeny project -- I thought I'd better try those Pearsall's silk perles that I have earmarked for the bell pull; I mean, what if they are absolutely horrible to work with and I don't notice until I'm working on that big project !

So here is a little anchor, a slightly smaller version of the one I designed for the Faith Hope Love sampler (this I used for a Faith Hope Love bookmark, which I will stitch one day!), done on raw 28ct Quaker cloth with pearsall's silk perle #8 and #12, shade "Cream White".

The coverage of the #8 was less than I expected, but as the bell pull will be done on cream fabric I think that'll be all right. It is lovely to stitch with, so smooth and yet with lots of texture that catches the light, wonderful!

Wow, this looks really good

Great job on the design and the latest stitching Mabel!

Lovely little trial piece Mabel. Your new design for the bell pull looks great.

The design is fantastic! And I love this little experiment you have just done. Congratulations.

The lustre of those silk perles is fantastic!

You are such a neat stitcher!

Your stitching is so neat! Lovely work
Faith