Earlier this week I finally decided which Sparklies fabric to use for Windmills – the lighter of the two, called Summer Skies. I’d also finished work on the Stitcher’s Set, and had got as far as I could on the speciality version of the August SAL before I need to take stitch progress pictures for the blog. As several of the stitches in it require two hands to demonstrate, it’ll have to wait until my husband has the time to exercise his photographic skills, probably this weekend. So until then I am free to finally have a go at Windmills, which meant getting out the chart from my design folder. As I looked at it, with my original specifications, I noticed three things: Windmills has been through quite a few changes; it needs a few more; and it uses beads, which I’d forgotten to consider when picking Threadworx Bradley’s Balloons for my thread.

For one thing, Windmills actually started out much squarer than it is now; in fact it consisted of four squares off-set with triangular cut areas on both sides. At that stage I don’t think it was called Windmills yet. I can’t quite remember why I removed one of the cut areas in each square, but when I did it definitely looked like a toy windmill. It was then that I added the small windmills and the streamers.

According to my notes I originally thought of stitching the whole design in Caron Moonglow, an extremely pale blue, on Sparklies Ink (the fabric that I used for the smaller Frozen Flower). I then changed to Caron Firecracker on some sort of sky blue fabric. It wasn’t until a kind lady at West End Embroidery got me really interested in Threadworx perles that I finally decided on the very bright and cheerful Bradley’s Balloons.

But one thing I hadn’t considered was the beads. Originally (at the pale-blue-on-dark-fabric stage) I’d specified bright white beads. Would that still work? Perhaps it needed something that reflected the highly variegated and multicoloured thread. For a brief moment I toyed with Mill Hill’s Rainbow beads, black with shimmering oil-on-water colours. But it might be too much of a good thing – probably better to have a fairly neutral bead with all those dazzling colours already going on. So back to bright white. Then, as I was going through my watchmaker’s tins of beads, I came across a shade called Crystal Blue. It turned out to be a sparkly, slightly darker version of the blue in my fabric. All right then, a combination of white and blue beads to pick up on the fluffy-clouds-against-a-summer-sky background.

There was one more thing. It was all very colourful, but I felt it needed at least one part that was a bit less exuberant. What about the central bit of the design? Why not turn that into the tack or screw that attaches the toy windmill to its stick? If I used white for the outline and black or dark brown for the inner bit, that would give the design a clearer centre, somewhere for the eye to focus. I redrew the chart, hopefully for the last time.

And now I’m ready to stitch!