Weekend Progress Report #11

I finally did an accurate count on the acorns in my border for my RR piece: 81. The first photo, on the left, shows the tout ensemble with all 81 medallions in various stages of completion. I finished up all the acorn "caps" last Monday and spent the early part of the week stitching the acorn "nuts" ... I timed myself, slow stitcher that I am, and it takes approximately seven minutes for me to complete each acorn "nut". So, as you can imagine, I got thoroughly bored with the acorns somewhere around mid-week ... at which point I started working on my own panel. You can see my progress on that in this second photo on the right. The Prairie Schooler Harvest Time village scene will cover the entire top panel though I will have to condense and adapt it a bit to fit. One of those serendipitious little things: it is usually not a good thing to have two different dyelots of an overdyed floss ... but in this case two variants of Cider Mill Brown worked beautifully to give the covered bridge a light and shadow effect while maintaining the same color values. I will be extracting and re-charting some of the larger trees in the foreground of the chart as motifs for the panels in the second row, in case some of the other round robin participants have difficulty finding suitable charts for my piece. The third photo, again on the left, is a close-up of the back-stitching and long-stitching required to complete each acorn. As I said, I am a slow stitcher, and this back-stitching and long-stitching takes about nine minutes an acorn. A little math: 42 acorn nuts @ 7 minutes each equals 4 hours and 54 minutes; 81 acorns to back-stitch @ 9 minutes each equals 12 hours and 9 minutes; the total comes to 17 hours and 3 minutes just to complete the border. I just might complete my own panel as well since I will be off from work Holy Thursday, Good Friday and all of Easter week. This round robin has displaced everything else in my normal stitching rotation. Will I finish up the border and my bit in time for the April 15 mailing deadline? I certainly hope so ... it wouldn't do to fall behind in the very first rotation of the RR ... not exactly the way to endear myself to new stitching friends!

In any case, I have been blogging about this for so long that I thought it was about time I showed you a few photos ... if only to prove I have been working on this piece as diligently as I claim to be!