Celtic Autumn in alternative colours – 1

This past weekend, I made a start on the Lavender and Lace Celtic Autumn design, in the alternative colours. I stitched all the hours I had available, and, including a couple of weekday evenings, I’ve managed 10 hours of stitching so far, and it now looks like this:

This is the Celtic Autumn design after 10 hours of stitching

I’m stitching it on Zweigart ‘Platinum’ 28 count linen evenweave from Sew and So, with DMC stranded cotton (two strands). There are 35 shades in this design altogether, so the shading is really subtle in places, plus gold thread (I’m using Petite Treasure Braid PB03), plus five shades of Mill Hill seed beads. It’s very tempting to add some beads now, ‘just to see how they’ll look’, but I mustn’t get tempted too much, as I’m stitching this with the fabric on a rectangular rotating frame, and adding beads now will mean that I can’t roll the fabric up properly later. When I get to the stage of adding all the beads, I’ll put the fabric onto a Q-Snap frame, which is gentler on beaded fabric.

Using 35 colours of DMC means that the shading in the design can be subtle

I’ve decided to count the hours this takes me to stitch, so that I’ve got a proper record of how long it takes – usually, I make a very rough estimate, but I want to be more precise with this one, as it’s a big project, and I want to know how much of my life I’ve sacrificed to get it done!!

The grid to help me track how many hours I stitch for

To make that simple, I designed a grid in Excel, and printed it out on one sheet of A4, and each time I spend 10 minutes on my stitching, I put a cross in one of the boxes. The grid is divided up into six boxes horizontally by ten boxes vertically. That equates to ten hours of ten-minute slots. I folded the A4 sheet so that only one grid box out of the twelve is showing, so that it’s small enough to clip it to the edge of my floor frame. So far, it’s proving really easy to keep track of how long it’s taking.

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