Fawny of Eight

Bedroom Games was a bit of a marathon, but I didn't work exclusively on that. I stitched a number of other projects during the same period.

There was a time when I only ever worked on one project. "You can't be a real embroiderer until you're working on a number of projects at once," I was told. (No names, no pack-drill!)
So this may have been about when I became a 'real embroiderer'! It certainly helped me get past the 'godai'* of Bedroom Games.

I needed something smaller as a change from the quilt, and I knew that I really needed to increase my repertoire of stitches. I didn't want to do a traditional band or block sampler, so I came up with this.

I decided to call it "Fawny of Eight", a play on the heraldic "Gyronny of Eight" as it was all done using the same hank of Appleton's Crewel wool and it contained eight different stitches, not including the border.

Working round from the top right corner they are:
(Obviously) Basket-weave, Woven Stitch, Twill Variation, Horizontal Brick, Scotch Stitch, Florentine, Byzantine and Upright Brick. I have since learned that some of these stitches have different names in different places, and some of the names can be applied to another stitch - that's life!
Whatever the names you may know these stitches by, it was an excellent exercise in learning new stitches and working out how to compensate them.

I stitched this between March and July 2002. I think of it as a 'stash' piece because nothing new was purchased. The canvas was already in the house, and the Appleton's was left over from the chair I posted about in October 2018.

* 'godai': The point you hit on any large piece of work, no matter how much you love the design. Extrapolated from the phrase "God I hate this". It hits me at least once in every project, but the trick is never to let it overwhelm you because you know that if you push yourself past that stage and complete the project you (or someone else) is going to love it.