I'm in the final bits of the crewel ICC main piece. In the meantime, I've been doing some finishing on my preliminary samplers. Nothing here I haven't shown before when the stitching was done.
But, still, it feels like an accomplishment to have this done.
I did this stitch sampler first. The top has a casing for bellpull hardware (right now it has a wooden coffee stirrer placeholder).
I left the tops of the pockets open--they're small, perhaps 6" tall, and I wanted to be able to get my hand inside.
I found some crewel print furnishing fabric on sale for a very good price and bought a yard to do all of my backings.
When finishing this pocket, I just folded down the selvedge, which is printed with color samples from the fabric.
As I was going along, I began collecting images and notes into a notebook. I've also put my final paper and the images that go with it into the notebook. The notebook cover twill matches the backing fabric a bit better than the others. That's because the knitting yarn I used for the leaf sampler embroidery was a blue-tinged green and I didn't like it at all with the furnishing fabric. So I tea dyed it. (I used it as a practice to tea-dye the shawl I had knit with the yarn. I thought my niece would prefer more olive shades than blue.)
Just a few more hours on the main piece, then I will stretch it and block it and send it off for final critique.
