More – slow – progress on Treasure Trove (I work on it mostly at my Monday afternoon stitching group) and I have learnt something new: leather is tough! Even lovely soft pliable kid. And as I have never been able to work with a thimble, my fingers got pretty sore; at one point I almost succeeded in giving myself a finger piercing. Perhaps I should have put a little silver stuf in it and started a trend…

Anyway, I have now attached all the gold kid, and it looks very pretty and shiny and padded. Next step: embellish the gold roundels with a border of Jessica stitch. Now many instructions for this stitch (for example in Papillon’s Around the World SAL) end with the final stitches lying on top of the first stitches, but that grates with my symmetry obsession. To look the same all the way round, the lest stitches need to be taken underneath the first ones! Having settled that, I worked the first of the Jessica borders, in perle #8. It looked rather chunky. I liked it, but I did wonder whether perle #12 would look better. I decided to do the next one in #12, and then unpick the one I liked least. Unfortunately perle #12 doesn’t come in nearly so many colours as perle #8, so I had to use a darker shade, but at least I could find one that would fit in. And here they are, #8 on the left, #12 on the right:

I like the lacier look of the #12, but it turned out to look too dark after all, and I didn’t like the gold showing through quite so clearly. I will use perle #12 Jessicas in future designs, I’m sure, but here I’m going with the original #8. (One lady at the stitching group suggested doing two in #8, and two in #12, placed diagonally; it would still have symmetry but would use both styles. Clever, but I went with the safer option of having them all the same.)

On a completely different subject, my husband gets these tool catalogues which he peruses with the same enthusiasm which I would accord a hand-dyed thread catalogue with coloured pictures, and occasionally he finds something weird and wonderful for 35p which he simply can’t resist. Sometimes he shares these treasured finds with me, so I am now the proud owner of a pair of magnifying tweezers. I haven’t used them yet, but they do actually look as though they could come in quite handy in Hardanger!