Friday, 4th June 2010

I can show it at last

I have mentioned several times that I was working on some mini petitpoint, a rug called Boria 1003, done with DMC on 32count silk gauze.  Well, it is finished and our little quiz on Petitpointers is over and I can now show it to you.  I really enjoyed doing this one.  In fact both Pat in Phoenix who was doing the same rug at the same time and I both enjoyed it so much that we were sad when our rugs were finished. 

Not that it was a quick exercise to do this rug.  And that's apart from the fact that it is 9 1/4" x 6 3/4" - the largest rug I have done on silk gauze so far.  It  has 64,687stitches - just as well you only have to do one at a time, isn't it vbg?  Mostly it was because I stopped and started, with long gaps between.  I began in July 2008 while we were on our Queensland holiday, and by 22nd  I had completed the first two pages of charts

After our return I kept stitching and by our Petitpointers' 'Show and Tell' on 10th August  the four pages of charts for the top row were finished and I had made good progress on the next four charts, as you can see in this next photo.

Then other things took over and I didn't touch the rug again until our 7 month long trip in 2009.  Towards the end of that trip I started on the rug again, and by the end of the year was pleased to have worked out where I was in the charts, found the rhythm once more and was going great guns.

 

I showed the rug to Joy, a miniaturist friend I met through the Stay at Home Miniaturist Club and who lives in Renmark, South Australia, when we visited her and her husband on our way through there in January and this is where I was up to at that stage.

When we returned to Sydney again at the end of January this year, I needed to do a whole lot of little projects for our SaHMC birthday swaps, and it was a while before I could get back to do the last little bit to finish the rug off.  Finally it was done - and I found I didn't want to leave it at that.  I added an extra two rows to the border, echoing the brown and beige that is on the inside of the dark green.

So it has been a really enjoyable experience.  Where will I use it?  I have no idea!  Someone told me that I'm what is called a procedural stitcher or something similar - it's the process of stitching that is the pleasure, not necessarily the function of the finished product.  And that seems to hit the nail right on the head! 

The Boria however is such a lovely rug that I'm sure there will be a place for it somewhere!  And here it is, a bigger photo than the one at the top: