Diary of a Revolution Sampler 2

Day 2

Well I'm now wondering what on earth I've started. 

The day began really well. The piece is an oversized embroidery sample with 99 vertical rows of embroidery, in lots of colours, representing the slogan 'We are the 99%'. I've not decided yet whether to include the 100th row.

With the help of two books: Magic Crazy Patchwork by J.Marsha Michler (a fantastic book if you want to know everything there is to know to create crazy quilts.) and a very old embroidery book Erica On Embroidery by Erica Wilson which was published in 1975 and belonged to my granny - I managed to find 85 stitches and variations.

So, I now have a plan for the embroidery. Every 10th line there will be a row of quilting stitches - represented by the yellow line on the photo.

The piece measures approximately 1 metre wide which means a line of stitching every 1cm. Now the problems are beginning. This may be too close and the stitching will shred the paper or it may be fine and hold everything together seeing as the bondaweb seems to have come unstuck during the night around all the sides. This could have been due to me moving the piece around a lot last night because I was so thrilled with it!

So this afternoon I started to outline two of the letters which I marked with tacking stitches last night. It takes a lot longer to stitch than fabric because you can't bend it but it can be done. However as I sat there I began to do some maths: 100 rows of stitching even if I manage one a day that's three months. That's when I stopped calculating and began to seriously wonder if I've gone mad. It's not like I have nothing else to do, for starters there's a pile of quilt tops waiting to be quilted and oh yes I have to go to work tomorrow.

Well I'm not giving in yet and the first two letters, split stitch and rather large outline/stem stitch, don't look bad at all.