The Virtual Shopping Spree, finishing up (finally!)

More from the shopping trip...

I bet you thought I was finished with it, right? HA! There's a reason Sarah Leigh likes seeing me come in the door of Scarlet Thread!! (And we won't get into the fact that I also bought Secret Grab Bags to hand out at next week's S&B, or that my mother bought stuff for my upcoming birthday. We help with her bottom line, that's for sure!)

ANYway, the last stuff I got was some DMC floss (same price as Michael's/AC Moore at this point) and a tiny piece of congress cloth for $1.60. Ages and ages ago - at least four years - I'd been playing around with squares-of-American-flag designs, and had come up with one I liked. A 50x50 pixel square, which I figured I'd just stitch up as straight cross-stitch. That was then.

Now you may remember my beloved wallet: a nice little bit of canvas, done up with silk, that got worn to death as, well, a functioning wallet. I decided to do the same thing this time around, only larger - say "tote bag" sized. I do trash my totebags over time, but it takes much longer than it takes to trash one of my wallets. So, figure every stitch over three threads... and the congress cloth was big enough for a 50x50 stitch grid. Yay!

Here, you can see the guts of my wallet (what's left - quite a few of the stitches are actually completely worn away down to the canvas!), the pattern I created, the DMC floss I'll be using, and what I've done thus far.


I think maybe you can see the stitches better here:

Each stripe of the flag will be a different stitch (the next red stripe will be Rhodes stitch squares; the next white is likely going to be a tied cross of some sort - I'm still trying to choose between a double-layer first cross, or two tall thin crosses side by side, with the horizontal tie over whichever it is.) Because I used an odd number of threads (giving me an even number of holes per stitch), things that need a center stitch like Queen stitch are right out. Sigh. The blue field will be in some pretty bargello pattern that will stand on its own without color stripes (since I'll be changing colors where the colors change on the pattern); the stars will be just plain continental stitch, with a five-point star overstitched where appropriate (see wallet for example). As of last Tuesday, this was the photo, and this was the carry-around project du jour. You'll see it again when it's finished (although probably not yet in tote bag form).

(Note how I snuck in something kinda patriotic for Presidents' Day. Sneaky, eh?)