Intervention Brought Me Back To My Blog

Wow!!  It's been a LONG time since I posted to my blog.  I guess life just gets in the way sometimes, and things, like a stitching blog, tend to fall by the wayside, however, I recently started a new project and it came to my mind that I should blog about it from the beginning.

I'm calling this project Intervention, because I think that is what I'm in need of for thinking about this.

It's all started with this book:

  I bought this book years ago when MJ and I were in Baltimore.  He was off with his baseball card geek friends, and I met up with a stitching friend and we were off on an adventure to The Stitching Post, a needlework shop in the area.  While I was there I found this book.  It is filled with beautiful French motifs and borders from the 18th and 19th century.  I haven't done a lot of stitching out of it, but I love to look through it, which I was doing recently when an idea came to me: I should pick different things out of the book and just stitch them.  For me, this is very outside the box.  I stitch what others design.  I never change things.  Sometimes I might tweak a color or two, but that's about as adventurous as I get.  Just make this up as I go along?  Could I do that?

The first thing I needed to do was pick colors.  Each motif and border in the book uses only two colors, so I picked five color combinations that I liked.

They're all different color families, but they are all colors that I really liked when I was looking through my floss stash.  For me, this was the hardest part.

Now it was time to start stitching.  I decided the best place to start would be in the center.  I thought that I would pick a large motif for the middle and work from there.

This only took a couple of days to complete.  

After the center was complete I had to decide what to stitch next.  I thought choosing and working on the borders would be a good next step.

I was worried that my borders would be uneven, so I ran red thread through all sides so I would know where to start each corner.  Why red?  Because it's a color that I didn't pick to stitch with.  This first border reminds me of acorns that fall from the many oak trees that populate Long Island in autumn, so I used the earth tones for this one.

Where will this project go from here?  I can't really say.  There are a lot of possibilities in my book to choose from, and like life, I think this project will be a journey.