“Point Sampler” on Guatemalan wool, with pearl cottons, metallic floss, and silk ribbon - from the top left, chain stitch, pekinese stitch, fly stitch with colonial knots, long-tailed lazy daisies with a colonial knots, sheaf stitch, lazy daisy, whipped long-tailed lazy daisies with french knots, seed stitches, berry stitch and long-tailed french knots, chain stitch with more long-tailed french knots, moss stitch, wheat ear, variations on fly stitch with french knots in silk ribbon, and a whipped spider web. Approx 4″X6″.

This was made for week two of the Personal Library of Stitches Class, back in November-December 2007. Weeks one and three samplers can be found here.

The lesson was on the concept of “point” — stitches that can stand by themselves, or be grouped for certain effects. I used a piece of the wool that I purchased for an Advent stole (to be posted later this week), thinking that I would embroider it rather than doing all of the embellishment by machine. I ended up going a much simpler route for the stole, because the relatively loose weave of the fabric made it difficult to needle and keep the stitches uniform.

The picture is not as clear as I would like, due to the need for a flash on the dark color and the sheen of the threads. The Pekinese stitches, top right and laced with gold floss, especially do not stand out as much as they do in person.

Clerical Stole made of light wool suiting and cotton batik pieced applique, applique is satin-stitched with variegated thread.

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Back in September, I taught my daughter’s first grade class how to finger-knit. It was fun and chaotic and exhausting.

After at least five parents asked me to show them how to do it so that they could help their kids, I made a video tutorial with the video function on my still camera, and put it on YouTube:

Today, five months later, almost 35,000 people have watched it. This blows my freaking mind.

Here are some images I’m contemplating for my February Take it Further piece. Initial thoughts are here.

This one is my favorite:

I’m not certain this will be a fiber piece yet — I may go for paper collage instead in the interest of time. To be honest, I’m not very motivated on this one.

Starting in November, I took an embroidery class online at Joggles.com from the amazing Sharon Boggin, who is also the host of the Take it Further Challenge. The class was titled “Personal Library of Stitches,” and the goal was to develop a repertoire of embroidery stitches and design concepts to create freehand works of embroidery. For the first lesson I started with this:

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