Come Stitch with Me – The Year of the Stash

Since I finished the Celebrate Sampler, I’ve been thinking about what we could stitch together. The size of my stash is large, probably too large, and I’d like to whittle it down, so I’m declaring this the year of the stash.

We’ll stitch stash-busting projects together all year. I’m going to work to make them easy, larger enough so that we can use them for many things, and simple enough for any stitcher to make.

Along the way we’ll also talk about threads, color schemes and finishing and making needlepoint fit into your home and your life.

The plan is to have one piece per season, working on it for three months. So in January, April, July, and October a new piece will be introduced.

The first one is called Winter Stars and I’m doing it in shades of blue with some white.

Here are the rules I’m using in stitching my own projects.

• All threads, even the background thread when possible, must come from stash.
• Whenever possible, open skeins and packages of threads must be used. So when I pulled threads for the winter project, I pulled no full skeins.
• If you keep a scrap bag of odds and ends of thread, some of those must be used in every project.
• If the background or border for a project needs to be a single color, you may either take several skeins of a single color from stash or purchase background threads.

I’m having so much fun pulling the threads for my first project and I’m really looking forward to doing these together.

So even though we might be making do, we will be living richly and making beautiful things along the way.

Update: I started stitching the first stash project last night and it looks great. This is going to be so much fun!