Trust Your Instincts

I have to confess that I’m not very good at taking a design and the suggested fibres and adjusting either to suit my own preferences. I have a sneaking suspicion in the back of my mind that the designer is perfect and I couldn’t possibly improve on their choice.

Case in point: Linda Driskell’s Wildflower Drawn Thread Sampler.


In kitting this up, I toned down the colours for the flowers as the originals were just too bright for me. I also replaced the specified ribbon with a more readily accessible one, and in stitching, added some additional beads. (Hmm, maybe I’m better at this amendment thing than I originally thought.) However, I still made a significant mistake – the design uses white fabric and thread for the drawn thread bands. Why, oh why, didn’t I change to an off-white/ecru colour scheme? It’s what I wanted to do at the time, but that little voice at the back of my mind kept saying , oh no, the designer knows best!

Well, I enjoyed stitching the drawn thread bands in the last few weeks before Iona was born, and I do still like the design, but I do wish I’d gone with my off-white colour scheme. As such, the design remains unfinished and I don’t see myself finishing the stitching in the near future. All that white looks too cold and just puts me off!

I now have another project where the designer has given us stitchers free-er choice of the fibres to be used. Such a dilemma for me – it took me a couple of months to choose mine!

Here is my progress so far on Gay Ann Rogers’ Mystery in a Corner.

My inspiration for the colour scheme was the Watercolours thread in Shenandoah which shades from green through turquoise to pink. I’ve roughly matched the green and pink shades to equivalent DMC perl/stranded cotton and am using them as some of my other fibres. I’ve been a bit more creative with my choice of metallic threads, using DMC Pearlescent Effects (rather than Kreinik braid) to match to the pink and turquoise threads and Kreinik fine braid to match the green. I also wasn’t able to easily get hold of a matching colour of Impressions and am therefore using stranded cotton.

I do like the end result, although I do still doubt the distribution of my colours in the end design. I was about to change them round a bit until I read Pierrette/lovetostitch99’s blog and her account of stitching this part and thoughts on the distribution of the colours. Now I think I’ll persevere with my original choice.

So lesson to self – trust your instincts! Other stitchers, even when they are designers too, don’t know me as well as I do, and everybody (even a designer) is allowed to make a mistake once in a while!