I have continued to work on the first quilt block star. In the photo above, you see the completed purple corners that surround the central star I talked about last time, plus the copper wings in stitch five and the light terra cotta flanking patterns around the copper wings that makes up stitch six. (By the way, the photo shows the copper wings as silver but they are a light copper color.)
The corner wings were tricky to stitch as each stitch's holes are covered by the previous stitch. These were done in copper metallic Color D4 instead of D1 which is what Tony tells you to do. My D1 thread is DMC metallic floss which gave me fits when I tried to lay it properly for this stitch so I switched to my D4 color (Kreinik 021 in #8 fine braid). It looks good with the other colors and the Diagonal Fishtail Areas make a nice braided corner in Kreinik metallics.
The Parallelograms that make up the fifth stitch of the Marilyn Monroe block look easy. You stitch parallel lines that are crossed by horizontal lines sort of like the # symbol. Then you put slanted lines / on top of the first two steps and follow up by three rows of backstitch. Simple, right? Well, no. I found the starting and stopping points of each step a little tricky to get right. In fact, I'm going to have to remove the backstitches from my first pair of stitches as I started them too high and they don't reach to the bottom of the block as they should. This step is done all in terra cotta C2, which is DMC cotton floss 758 for me.
Two more stitches remain to finish the stitch block once I finish stitch five. After that, I need to make up my mind whether to add purple metallic to the sashing blocks (you can still vote your preference on this at the poll at the top of the page but do look carefully at the borders and my progress on the first block to see how the colors will look together) and pick up a new thread to stitch the third outer border at the top. Currently only two of the three borders are stitched. So I have a way to go before I finish all I intend to on Stars before starting a new small painted canvas.
Written by Jane/Chilly Hollow
Blogging at http://chillyhollownp.blogspot.com
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