It has been hot for4 days now and today was so hot that my glasses have been fogging up and if that is not bad enough, when I tilt my head forward the glasses start to do a slow slide down my nose, makes it nigh on impossible to sew and to think that Melbourne and Adelaide are even hotter…
A quit job I have found to fill in some of the day is to update my Blogroll and I would like to introduce the 2 Blogs that I have added
The first blog is Story of a Sampler, Mandie started her sampler on the 21st November until then her stitching history was limited to cross stitch and black work, She started her sampler with these stitches that she did know and then went on to work her way through the stitches in the ‘Reader’s Digest Complete Guide to Needlework’, I think that choosing a book to work her way through was a great ideas for teaching herself and it has been exciting to watch how quickly her stitching has improved…If you are a beginner wanting to start a sampler read this post and then browse through Mandie’s other posts and be inspired to get started…Mandie also has a list in her sidebar of other blogs that are making band samplers.
The other Blog is Time Out Stitching, a quilting blog written by my sister in law so I can tell you that she has been a fine stitcher since school days…
I hope that you enjoy these 2 blogs
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 I wanted to get the last panel finished before going on with this new one so I am few days late with this detail, Australia day is the 26th January…I used a silk thread and stem stitch for the outline of the map.
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 Panel 6 is the longest of the panels yet and I am thinking that it will be the longest that I will do because it is to long to photograph easily…we did try and get a photograph of joined panels unrolled on the floor but it went through 3 rooms with 3 different light conditions and did not photograph well.
Below is an image of the rolled sampler, I held it in my hand to give an idea of scale. On the top of the roll the dark red binding is the first 10 feet the gold binding the second 10 feet and the last 2 1/2 feet is green, you can also see how the tags show along the edge of the roll.
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A friend saw this stitch on one of my crazy quilts and I got the book, The Complete Stitch encyclopedia by Jan Eaton, to show her the directions and decided to do a few samples of it while I had the book out…The stitch is called Crow’s Foot.
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I will use sewing equipment charms to tag my samplers anniversaries…I use the Tags (charms) down the side of the sampler as I would use bookmarks in a book.
At this point I would have liked to have a photo of All the panels from year 1 but it will have to wait untill tomorrow because I am still putting the ribbon down the sides of panel 6.
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 Tomorrow is My Band Samplers 1st Anniversary, when I told my son he asked how long?…To wrap up the first year I have done a summary of my samplers statistics…
And how long is it? It is 22 1/2 feet which for metric users is 6.75 metres (Australia converted to metric measurements in 1970, I can work in metric but as all my Quilting rulers, imported from the USA, are imperial I tend to work in imperial.)
 The fabric that I have used for this panel was 72 inches wide so it is a very long panel which I am nearly to the end of and while I was stitching the summary I decided to cut the last 7 inches off the end because it is getting impractically long to keep in one roll and by finishing a panel at the end of the year and starting a new one I will have the option of rolling the panels in one year rolls.
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 I had to think about the date to embroider on this one because where I was watching the TV coverage in Australia it was 4 am on wed 21st but that date doesn’t work because History will say that Barack Obama was Inaugurated on the 20th January 2009 and an historic day it is, certainly for the USA and I think that it will go down as a an important day in World History which is why I have recorded it on my Sampler.
This afternoon I picked Sharon up and we went to the Botanic Gardens to meet up with Doreen who is also from Canberra and Judy who is visiting from Adelaide, we had a lovely afternoon of show and tell and chat…see Sharon up and we went to the Botanic Gardens to meet up with Doreen who is also from Canberra and Judy who is visiting from Adelaide, we had a lovely afternoon of show and tell and chat.
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Before I started doing samples of chicken scratch the only way that I could think that I would use chicken scratch would be if I wanted to make a miniature apron and before I knew it I was making a miniature apron using 1/16th inch gingham and simplifying the pattern to single cross stitches…The only model that I could find that was the right scale (5.5 inch high Doll) was dressed as some sort of super women, an outfit that doesn’t quite go with and pink apron but you get the idea.
 That is all the chicken scratch that I am going to do so I have taken a photo of the whole chicken scratch section.
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I think that I have mixed feelings about Chicken Scratch, it is not a stitch that I would have chosen for crazy quilting (and crazy quilting is my main focus of stitch chose on my sampler) and I do find it a bit tedious to work but now that I am playing with it the patterns that can be formed are sucking me in…Umm with waste canvas I could add them to crazy quilting…
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 The next obvious variation of chicken scratch for me to sample was reverse chicken scratch, the image on the right shows the chicken scratch and reverse chicken scratch together, I love how the change of thread colour has the appearance of changing the colour of the ground fabric.
I then did chicken scratch as a counted thread, next to that done on the gingham background I thought this line looked almost to perfect…If you look closely the left side is slightly different to the right side because some directions laced the thread around twice and other directions only laced the thread around once, so I just had to try both….for the first 4 laced stitches I wrapped the thread around twice and for the last 4 I only wrapped it around once, I prefer the double wrap.
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