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Yes you can see the varigated and it is very subtle but it works with the black.

Finished the third band of the bookmark this afternoon at the stitching group More than half done!

Wonderful!!!!!

Beautiful!!

Love the 8th Madonna, that is such a great shade and the dark fabric is perfect for showing it off.

The bookmark is looking great

Like #8 and your bookmark is looking good so far

Great work Mabel. I agree with you though number 8 one is my least favourite too.

The bookmark is so beautiful, Mabel.

I'm back from London (will write a bit more about it in the General section) and owing to a very delayed coach I managed to do quite a bit of stitching: a fair bit of my "handbag project" (one of the tulips):



And most of another Madonna (apart from the gold as I didn't have that with me. Oh, but before I left I'd just finished the previous one, these two are the last of my current fabric/thread combination experiments -- I'll be doing something different for a while now!

Anyway, Madonna #9 was on 18ct green aida using one strand of Caron Watercolours and pearl blending filament. The Watercolours was better behaved on 18ct than on 20ct, but it was still quite bulky, and difficult to get to lie flat and even where the stitching was not in rows (especially visible on the baby's face). Even so, I like this shade very much (Faded Linen) and think it works well with the green fabric. But I don't think I'll be using Watercolours for any more Madonnas (I have a few mini Hardanger projects planned though, for which it should be perfect!



The final experiment was Caron Impressions on 24ct black Congress Cloth. This combinaton is a winner! Coverage is good, it's a lovely thread to work with, very soft and the "look" is also very soft and a bit woolly, and it is very well-behaved, lying flat even when stitching in spirals. I've also used it on the 20ct aida and although coverage is a bit less full there it works equally beautifully. This was done in shade 001 Sandstone, and it's one of my fvourites this far. I've ordered a few stronger shades of Impressions to see if they will work as well as the subtler ones -- I'll keep you informed!

Great again, Mabel

very nice!!

These are great!!!!!

Beautiful, as always!

Love them

I should think you could stitch the Madonna off by heart without the chart!

I love your work, Mabel.

The Madonnas are beautiful as always, I quite like the one on green
Love the tulip looking forward to seeing more of them.

lizthebob wrote:I should think you could stitch the Madonna off by heart without the chart!

Large chunks of it I can !

Lovely work as always .

I have found the perfect designs to do in between Madonnas and bookmarks -- and found them competely by chance, too ! I was looking for Hardanger freebies and a link on a blog led me to this Russian blog. My Russian in non-existent apart from a certain knowledge of the Cyrillic alphabet and a few words, but I noticed some charming designs there so looked further. I found some folk-type designs of animals, with their names incorporated into the designs in Cyrillic letters. It was the camel ("verblyud") that drew my attention.

Why? It's a bit of a long story, but I'll try to condense it . DH and I met on a forum dedicated to Flanders & Swann, two men who wrote and performed funny/satirical songs in the 1950s and 60s. They are both dead now, but DH met both of them in their time and I got interested in them through a colleague who'd been in England in the 60s. The forum, headed by Leon who looks after the Flanders & Swann estates, is very lively and friendly, and in 2003 a group of about 15 of us met in London. Leon asked Donald Swann's widow whether we could gather in her house, in the music room where many of the songs were written, and she said yes, and we've been meeting there once a year ever since. DH and I got married in 2005, and Leon (who is an opera singer) sang at our wedding, and another member of the group who is a Salvation Army major married us.

Donald Swann was half Russian, and one of the songs they used to sing was a Russian song (based on an existing folk song) about a caravan of camels in the desert, and one of the camels had hurt its foot. It was called Verblyud. So when I found a Russian design of a camel, with the word Verblyud in it, and a mention of "verblyud karavan" (obviously "caravan of camels") underneath it, I knew it would be the perfect Thank You card for Alison (the widow) to show our appreciation to her for letting us invade her house every year. I added a bandage around the camel's hind foot to make it more like the song , and here it is:



Another of their songs, probably the most famous one, is the Hippopotamus Song (with the chorus Mud, Mud, Glorious Mud). Occasionally they would sing the second chorus of this song in Russian, so the Russian Hippo chart will be a Thank You card for Leon for organising the Get-Together every year, and for moderating the forum and generaly just being a good friend ! Haven't stitched that one yet, but if the camel is anything to go by it shouldn't take more than two evenings. There is also a Whale chart, and they had a song about a whale (though not in Russian), so I may do that one for myself. Watch this space!