My new year’s resolutions aren’t doing too badly after all – I actually finished one of the long-term WIPs! Yes, the third Hannah Dunnett tree is complete, and I am very glad to see the back of it. No, that’s unkind; I do like the tree trio, and it gave me a lot of opportunities for experimenting. But taking the project out of its hoop and placing it in my Finished Projects folder did give me a great deal of satisfaction.

This meant I could now concentrate on that very-long-term WIP, Llandrindod. Taking it to my weekly embroidery group which started up again last Monday I made progress on the split stitch, and also put in some of the subtle bling. In the Llandrindod project box there are several different sparkly threads, some Petite Treasure Braid, some blending filaments, mostly in pearlescent white. This I hoped would give a little sparkle without drawing too much attention to itself. I decided on the thinner blending filament, on the grounds that if it turned out to be so subtle as to be unnoticeable, I could always overstitch it in the slightly thicker Petite Treasure Braid.

The other ladies at the embroidery group liked the effect, and so did I, but I wasn’t altogether sure I liked it enough. The pearlescent white worked fine on the central diamond, but was it the right thing on the coloured gems? And then I remembered that I had some coloured blending filaments tucked away in a box; a mix of two now discontinued brands, which would normally mean I couldn’t use them for a design that will be available as a chart pack, but fortunately equivalents should be easy to find in Kreinik’s range. Did I have the necessary colours though? I did.

Doing a bit of work one evening while Mr F watched a documentary about Pompeii, I managed to finish all the remaining split stitch, and then it was time to see whether the coloured blending filaments would work. Although I have a red, blue, green and purple, the blue and green especially are not an exact match for the silk used to stitch the gems. I therefore decided to try the green gem first – if I like the effect there, it’s safe to assume I’ll like it in the other three gems as well.

And do I like it? I’m not sure… I’ll leave it for a bit while trying to do some homework for my next Canvaswork class, and come back to it in a week or so to see how the two variations strike me when seen afresh. Meanwhile, feel free to comment and let me know what you think!

PS The close-up picture of the green gem shows that the stitches at the pointy end of the gem are not symmetrical. I will have to do something about that or it will continue to niggle at me!