My oldest UFO, unearthed.

One of the Summer Break activities offered at HPKCHC this year is "Ancient Ruins". It's opened up (thankfully) to all forms of needlecraft. Here's what I turned in for my proposal:

Dear Professor, here is my proposed Ancient Ruins project. As with many Ancient Ruins finds, it began with an excavation. The Stash Room can be a frightening place, but in a corner on the far left side (approximately Position C in the first Stash Tour photo), I found my oldest UFO. It's Teresa Wentzler's Castle Sampler, first released as a kit in January, 1992. (Neither the kit nor leaflet are currently available, although a downloadable file is scheduled to be released in the future.)

The initial find was a half-stitched sampler racked on a set of 17"x17" Q-Snaps, and enclosed in a protective wrapper.


The outer wrapper was emblazoned with the words "The Needlework Loft". This is the *former* name of Knit+Stitch=Bliss, a Bethesda, MD LNS. The name of the store changed in April, 2003, so even the outer wrappings of this find are Ancient. Once the find was extracted from the wrappings, one detail became glaringly obvious:


The adhesive on the edges of the cloth of the find is also Ancient. (OMG, I was still new enough to cross stitch when I started this that masking tape to secure the edges actually seemed like a good idea! *SHUDDER!!!!*). The other thing in the wrappings appeared to be this: an Ancient pattern leaflet from the early 90's.


Inside the leaflet, however, was an even more Ancient relic: the original printed material from the original kit, purchased - and started - during my first year in Denver, in 1992.


Seriously. It's all still there! The thread charts, the color key....


... and the original Ancient Map to the Castle!!!


Now, since it's been a really, really long time since I've started this (1992 - there are people reading this younger than this UFO!), and, clearly, a long time since I've touched it (2003, at the very latest), I would like to keep it from becoming a 20-year-old-UFO. There are a few stumbling blocks, of course:

1. The original threads from the kit have long since been sorted into various floss boxes, so recompiling *all* the necessary threads would present an undue hardship in the allotted timespan.
2. It's a Wentzler. Nobody finishes a Wentzler in a month, unless they forgo eating, sleeping, and stitch a whole heck of a lot faster than I do
3. At some point in the past 20 years, I've started to cross my Xs in the opposite direction from how I stitched way back then, so, to keep everything pretty, I'll be fighting my current instincts constantly.

Therefore, I'd like to propose that I attempt to finish the border - the alphabet, sun and moon blocks, and the in-between stitches - during the course of the month of August. I honestly don't know if I'll make it, but at least I'll get started - because I really, REALLY don't want this Ancient Ruin to have an age numbering in multiple decades!!