Sharon B's Sumptuous Surface Course

Hello!

Summer is almost over and there is a touch of autumn in the air. The sun is shining and there is a bite to the wind..... I'm almost glad for the year to be over as the summer has been horrendously cold and wet tho I shouldn't complain as there is drought and flooding and hurricanes and things in the world.

In any case, I have taken a new course with Sharon B, Sumptuous Surfaces and love it!!! Sharon puts on great classes with wonderful notes and instructions. She has a blog that shows tons of stitches with instructions on how to do them.

This is my first piece which covers the first half of the course. I have to do a bit more work on it to finish it up.

My house is such a mess as I have spent countless hours on the computer printing out pages of stitch instructions or looking up Youtube videos on how to do the various stitches. My first piece probably took me close to 50 hours to complete, if not more.

Sharon says that to complete a 4 in by 6 in piece, which is what mine is, should take about 15 hours or so. That is probably a fair assessment. What took me so long is that I had to learn a few stitches, tried them in my piece, didn't like the floss/thread I was using, or didn't like the look of the stitch or found the stitch hard to do in the floss I was using and then kept ripping them out of my work and redoing them in different thread. Though the first piece took that long, I'm sure the others will be closer to Sharon's estimate of 15 hours.

I absolutely LOVE this kind of work. Any stitching that I had ever worked on previously was always done by following a pattern; ie. this colour and this cross stitch goes in this spot. This is the first time that I ever designed my own piece and then put in the stitch I wanted in the place I wanted, in the colour I wanted. It was quite liberating and exciting!

This is a close up of the left corner of the piece. I have a small seashell to add to the white spot in the lower left corner.

This is the right side and I have a seashell to add over the ferns/seaweed in the right corner.

Thanks for visiting!

See you next time!