Seminar 2016: Fandango Pre-work

I finally received my kit :) Our teacher Barbara Kershaw emailed me last Monday saying my kit was shipped Friday. Luckily I didn't have this information over the weekend or I would have expired from impatience ;) It was hard to finish my work day as it was as I knew this would be waiting for me at home.

The kit came with the fabric and one ball of #8 perle cotton with instructions for basting the fabric and the pre-work we were expected to do.

I used my usual basting threads which is light pink. It's probably not a good color choice against that white, but it works for me.

I usually baste the fabric 12 threads over and 8 threads under, but for this class we were shown how to baste over and under 2 threads. This works much faster than my methods. There is little chance of making counting mistakes while basting. We add small notches at after 5 lines which indicates 10 threads and a bigger notch after we'd done 10 of these indicating 100 threads.

Counting becomes much easier and I was ready to move onto the next step. I quickly realized there was a problem. I had basted my fabric the same way they do it in hardanger, where the horizontal and vertical lines cross on the underside of the fabric, which meant I had an extra thread on either side of my center.

Luckily my teacher was one email away and I was able to get clarification on the instructions. When using this basting instructions, the horizontal and vertical lines should cross at the center.

Not a big deal. I'm so anal about counting and re-counting, I'm not worried about the extra thread. Plus, once the center square is stitched everything else is counted from it and not the center. So I moved onto the next step. The final prep-work that was needed to be done was a square around the center which would be used as a guide to stitch the center square.

And the fun can begin :) I love satin stitching. I'm going to enjoy working on this project in the next months.