embroidery: owl tote

owl tote, originally uploaded by pinstripe_bindi.

This is something I bought from Sublime Stitching last year and just got around to. It was kind of a palate cleanser after finishing the hurricane tracking map, it only took one afternoon/evening of work.

The pattern was stamped on the tote with water-soluble ink, so once you finish the stitching you just throw it in the wash and the pattern washes out, leaving just the floss. I prefer that to the iron-on transfers, which don't wash out. Sometimes the lines are too thick, or your stitching is a hair off, and you can see the pattern creeping around the edges, and that really bugs the perfectionist in me.

Next project (which I've already started) is a design from the House of White Birches Celtic Crosses book. The one I'm doing isn't actually a cross, it's a medallion that has one of those twisty bird designs. The backstitching is so complicated that I'm actually doing it piece by piece, instead of doing the whole design at once after I finish the primary stitches, like I usually do.

I'm doing it on 18-count Aida, which I haven't used in a while. I prefer evenweave, because it's more flexible and cloth-like. But they only make that in high stitch counts like 28 and 32; usually I use 28 and work over 2 squares for each stitch, which gives me a 14-count design. But I wanted this to be smaller because I'm probably going to use it on a piece of clothing somehow. I thought it would be fun to buy an old blazer from a thrift store and put it on the breast, like a private school crested blazer. But at 7" x 7", it might be a little too big for that. I won't really be able to judge until it's finished.

(You thought old cameras were the only thing I was obsessive about, didn't you?)