Mystery Revealed

Plenty of times in the past year I have not been able to show my stitching progress because a few friends and I decided to do a Friendship sampler round robin. 

We picked our own themes, set size limits, and ideally stitched our own band at the top. 

After many false starts, I chose a theme I called "Sea Me." Anything in the water, real or imagined. I picked a piece of lovely Glenshee linen from my stash and a number of Splendor silks along with two overdyed silk threads. (Warning: Glorianna is definitely not colorfast.)

We decided on six weeks as a time limit. And I spent my first five weeks with own piece just trying to decided what to do. 

Here is how I started:  with a wave, some herons who look like they are wearing berets, a lighthouse, a ship and two whales. The two dark lines are my dividing bands.  I was trying for the sampler look. 


I passed this along to a friend and received another sampler to work on. The hardest part of this was keeping secrets from each other. I can't say how badly we wanted to talk about these samplers as we see each other nearly every Friday for stitching time. Sometimes we sort of broke this rule and talked about things in a round about way. 


After five other people have had their hands on my piece of linen, this is what I got back:

How amazing is that? 


I'm overwhelmed by this project.


Now I need to stitch my dividing bands, then a wave motif at the bottom, and then I will include names of my friends who worked on this. 


We all agreed that our size limitations nearly killed us. Essentially we went with 2" tall by 6" wide. The two inches was horribly difficult and forced many people into stitching over 1.

Our plan is to finish these and show them in public in January which will be when I can post photos of what I stitched for others.