As many of you know, I was home with Rowen yesterday instead of at the office. (She's feeling better, but not yet 100% recovered from the flu.) Anyway, I wanted something to do with my hands during the moments I wasn't busy taking care of her, so I started Niek's Valentine's Day gift. And I finished the stitching today - hooray!



This is the first of the Saturday Sampler series from The Sampler Girl. To acquire this series, you have to sign up for her mailing list - definately not a hardship! The charts are very affordable, too. There's my enabling tip for the day! :-)

I hope Tanya (aka The Sampler Girl) doesn't mind the enormous liberties I took with her color scheme. I changed everything! I intentionally went with a kind of weird color scheme - it just suited my mood. I also wanted to do a project that used only silks from The Natural Dye Studio to give people an idea of how great they look and how varied her color line is. Was. Amanda, you have to return to dyeing embroidery fibers this summer! Pleeeeaaasse!! As I was saying, this uses only silks that are dyed using natural methods and that meant I had to find a very special fabric as well. So I unearthed one of the R&R Reproductions swatches that I won on eBay some time ago. This is 30 ct. Butternut. It's a gorgeous, deep color IRL - much more so than the scan shows. The scan also didn't do justice to the naturally-dyed silk (also from The Natural Dye Studio) which is this amazing sort of pale chartreuse IRL. I'll finish the sampler off as a mini-ornament using the silk for the back. I'll post another picture once the project is finished-finished.