Healthy Winter Pursuits!

A new set of little designs, for ornamentation of your festive abodes' come this winter...

soon they will be hanging on the tree!

I've chosen a nice winter grey background with the fine evenweave linen that is Zweigart 32 count Belfast Linen in 'Smokey Pearl'.  There was an extremely elegant shade in a lighter grey called 'Pearl Grey', but I chose the former to keep the white thread nice n 'poppy'.  Pearl Grey has of course gone into the stash to be reconsidered for another time.

As I was stitching these up, I felt the single strand of DMC Blanc floss for snow wasn't quite giving me the look I was after, it appeared a bit, well, underwhelming.  After some experimentation, I discovered what I was looking for in a thread called 'Coton a Broder' or 'Broder Special' (Art 107), a thread more commonly used for whitework I believe.

It is described by DMC as being 'soft and gentle to the touch', 'does not kink, knot or fluff' and is made of 4 non-divisible strands.  All in all a lovely thread to use which creates nice plump stitches while maintaining the defined cross using one thread alone gives.  It comes in 6 different sizes, I experimented and found size No. 30 was ideal for use with 32 count linen in shade BLANC.  The other white shade size 30 comes in is B5200 which is a brighter, blue-er white, something to keep for another project down the line.

(A side note, when I search for 'Broder Special' on the DMC USA site, it does not appear to be listed, a bit strange as it is available, also here.  If you change your country to UK, the details are there if you are looking for more information.)

My second thread 'discovery' was Kreinik's Metallic Blending Filament.  A very light, thin and soft little wisp of a thing, which gave a lovely sparkle to these projects and was pleasant to use.  The Kreinik site has a whole page dedicated to it's uses and care, it seems to have multiple uses for crafting, I liked it a lot.

So, I discovered a few new things during the course of these stitches, it's always great to expand one's knowledge in the sewing world.  I've been thinking a lot about embroidery of late, y'know - those other stitches that aren't all crosses ;-) -  I might just have to give it a try...