Line Sampler Needlebook

New Year greetings  and I trust that you had a lovely Christmas and holiday season. My family from Bangkok visited us and it was especially wonderful to see our two grandsons and spend time with them again.

Going through my photos I was reminded about a little needlebook I made with an Anchor variegated thread. I was curious to see how the colours would vary along different lines of stitching and I was quite pleased at the pretty result.

The other objective was to turn a small sampler of simple embroidery stitches into a useful item.

These are the stitches on the sampler:
The border is whipped backstitch.
Then from the top, the stitches are
stem stitch
running stitch
Holbein stitch
chain stitch with French knots
fly stitch and straight stitches
blanket stitch
my version of single fern stitches
herringbone stitch
coral or coral knot stitch
backstitch
and laced running stitch.






Once the embroidery was done, I damp stretched it on a cork board so that the stitches would not be flattened by the iron. I prefer damp stretching or blocking the embroidery because no matter how careful I am when ironing I seem to end up with slightly squashed stitches. I allow for extra fabric around the edge so that any pin marks that remain once the embroidery is dry can be trimmed off safely afterwards.

Inside the needlebook two felt pages are just enough to keep a few pins and needles to carry around with a ready to-go embroidery project.

Later: Apologies for any formatting errors. I have tried to fix them. It all looks fine when I edit the post but once it's published things seem to jump around.