November is getting nearer, and so I’m starting to get just a little bit twitchy. The whole SAL has been charted and half has been stitched, but that still leaves 6 projects to finish with only 10 days to go until the Materials List is due. Oh well, nothing like a challenge.

It still surprises me how you can completely miss things about charts you’ve drawn yourself until you actually stitch them. So far I have corrected missing bars, elements that aren’t quite lined up, and Kloster blocks with the stitches going in the wrong direction.

And of course there are the usual things which crop up whenever I work a stitched model – in one design I stitched part of the border only to find that I really disliked the way it looked. So one of the two speciality stitches in it was ruthlessly cast aside, and the border now consists of two off-set rows of the other speciality stitch.

Then I realised that two types of bar which I thought were part of the SAL had in fact not got into in any of the designs. Some quick recharting was called for, which took a bit of doing as I didn’t really want to start making changes to any of the months that I had already stitched!

While stitching one of the models I started wondering whether it would be possible to incorporate beads in bars, but instead of being sensible and experimenting on a scrap of spare fabric I just tried it out in the model I was working on. It didn’t work. Unpicking beads from bars is not easy … Even so I’m not giving up the idea entirely; I still think it may work with a different type of bar. Watch this space.

Quite a few things may still change in the designs for July to December, but as they stand now the whole series will contain (besides Kloster blocks and other typical Hardanger satin stitch elements) six types of bars, 11 filling stitches, three different ways of using beads, one ribbon stitch and 26 or so speciality stitches. I hope you will enjoy them!