Bee Sampler - Finished!

Finished! Utterly, completely, absolutely nothing left to add, finished. Except I haven’t posted it to my mom yet. But still! It is technically done even if the recipient of the gift hasn’t received it, right?

To the best of my knowledge, I designed the honeycomb border, row 2, 3, 5, 6, 8 and 2/3 of row 10.

If you haven’t already, you can see the design process in these previous posts: here, here and here.

Check out the amazing curtains I found in a thrift store! Thrill at the sight of our Ikea table and chair. Also, embroidery.

I already wrote in exhaustive detail about the embroidered comic (why on earth did I think this was an appropriate subject for my mom’s present?) so I’ll just write about the remaining rows. The ninth row is from Wilkins’ book Traditional Blackwork Samplers and I freakin’ love it. I think it’s so clever and it really does look like a row of irises.

The tenth row uses a flower band from The Beginner’s Guide to Blackwork and I added a repeating bee of my own design and the wheat (it’s supposed to be wheat) in the center.

The eleventh row is based on this Flickr image and it reminds me of a stained glass window from a craftsman style house.

The twelfth band is from the Beginner’s book and the thirteenth is from this etsy seller. I’ve blatantly stolen her design and I hope she doesn’t come after me. She’s got lots of cute blackwork and once the cashflow has been sorted I plan on buying a few because I can’t quite work out the count.

I’m also really proud of the alphabet I used. I was so burned out by this point I didn’t bother to research blackwork alphabets so I just made something up. I embroidered the start and end dates as well even though that’s a little embarassing to inscribe forever just how long it took me to finish this.

Little details really make this a favorite project. The way I made the leaves twist for the wheat in the tenth row stand out to me. And the three big motifs in the fourth row really irked me for a while – I thought they were too sparse and strange looking – but from a distance they look like circles inside of squares. Exactly as I’d hoped.

So here it is, mounted and ready to ship home!

About these ads