Wednesday, November 10, 2010

Some Numbers and a Dilemma

I stopped off yesterday afternoon and got a skein of 311, to see if that was the right blue color for my sampler. Unfortunately, that is not right either. Now I am thinking the blue that is already stitched may have faded over the 2 years my piece sat waiting for me to get back to it.

So now I don't know what to do. Any advice?

I'm tempted to just go ahead and use the 336, and let there be a difference in the color. I am going to check one more thing first though, I am going to check to see if I may have used an Anchor color. I don't know my Anchor colors very well, but it is possible. There is only one spot where it will be glaringly obvious, the middle of the letter "P" on the alphabet running vertically along the left side. The rest of the blues will be separated by other embroidery and white space.

Now for the numbers. There are 13 alphabets on the sampler. Now I haven't counted the letters in each alphabet. Many of them are French, and old, so letters would be left out. In several alphabets, I know there are additional letters, used if the name or initials have double letters or use an "A." It is too obvious if an alphabet starts with a letter other than "a" so that one usually gets doubled up. For example, on the alphabet I am working on now, the sequence is

A B D E F G A C H J K... etc.

IMG_0215

In this example, "A" is repeated, and there is no "I."

So when I say there are 338 letters of the alphabet, you know that is an estimate. The same holds true for the sets of numbers. There are 10 different number fonts, so you would guess there are 100 numbers, but most of the sets have at least 1 number repeated, mostly to document birthdays. Plus the Roman Numeral set has like 30 characters (like).

I have 3 alphabets completely stitched, and 3 sets of numbers, and a good start on 4 additional alphabets. I calculate I have 154 letters or numbers stitched, plus a goodly number of the motifs, which seem to be clustered towards the top of the sampler. That gives me 35% completed, better than I expected. Since I picked it up, I have stitched ACFHJK and half of one of the sets of numbers.

IMG_0215

2 comments:

MOM said...

I've see this piece before at your house, but I have no wisdom about the colors. To quote someone we knew,"A man riding by on horseback will never see the difference" if the colors don't match exactly, don't you think?

I just heard the other day about a professor who knew 13 languages and could read several more. He was cited as an example of "poor in spirit" a la Christ.

Debi said...

Hi Jane,

I am thinking that on this type of sampler it would be fine to have the different shade of blue. It would be consistent with the nature of the design. If it were me I might just take out the P that is partially done so the the color change is not in the middle of a letter. Or, if you are using two strands of thread to stitch, transition to the new color by using one strand of each in the needle for a bit (assuming you have a small amount of the old color left).
It is hard to advise without seeing it in person but I am sure it will be wonderful. Just think of the ladies who did these originally; they used what ever thread they had... often without any consistency in dye lots and such.

Happy Stitching!