The ES Blackwork Spring Garden SAL!

I'm so happy to share this exciting news!!!

For a while now, I've been wanting to pick a pattern and stitch it with some friends. Karen (of Karen's Colourful Creations) and CrazyStitcher aka CS, (of Crazy Cross-Stitcher) and I have been putting our heads together over the last month or so and gotten serious about making a SAL a reality this Spring :) I took on hosting duties, but they'll be stitching along with me and you're welcome to join in too if you'd like!

Coincidentally, I've been noticing tulips everywhere this year, which is strange because they've never been a particular favourite of mine or even in the family. But there's a lovely street near where I live that is lined with huge old trees, and several homeowners have planted tulips - of the most remarkable colours! - in rings around the tree trunks, and it has been such a pleasure watching them start to bloom :)

Since I've come to like those pretty flowers so much, I started scribbling some tulip shapes on graph paper, which led to this little square that I called "Spring Garden":

As you can see, it's pretty tiny, roughly 2.5" square:

It was cute, but really small, and I felt like it was missing something. I wasn't pleased with my choice of fabric either. I used that "oatmeal" colour I always think of as "rustic", imagining that it would sort of look like burlap and very garden-y but it just made the pattern hard to see and the beads I added at the last minute clash with it.

Both Karen and CS really liked it though and thought that it would be a good pattern to stitch for Spring! When Karen suggested a bookmark, everything finally fell into place! The square became the center and I added "brackets" at the top and bottom:

Happily, this also gave me the perfect excuse to add in some Rhodes Hearts, which I've been wanting to try for a really long time! I think the whole Rhodes family is very pretty, and I'm really looking forward to working these!

The SAL will run from Monday, May 20th to Thursday, June 20th, 2013. In other words, it will end on the last day before Summer starts :) There's lots of time so that everyone can stitch and finish their bookmark at their own pace!

How to Join:

Please leave a comment on this post if you intend to stitch along, and then send me an e-mail (my address is in my sidebar at right, under the postage stamps).

I know a lot of people don't have a problem with leaving their e-mail address in the comment sections, so you can do that too, but it's not the safest thing to do so it's better to let me know where I can find your address - for example, in your Blogger profile. I need your e-mail so I can send you the files as a .PDF attachment. If you have any trouble opening the file, please let me know! If you don't already have the latest Adobe update for your computer system, you can download it for free here.

There's three versions of the chart - the original Colour version, a Black and White version and a Custom Colour version (to help you graph your own colourways!) - and I've added in some graphs detailing the way I stitched the three "specialty stitches" in the design, in case you'd like to do the same!

This is a great little project to use up scraps of threads leftover from larger works, and perfect for some stitchy experimentation ;) It's a quick stitch too!

If you have any questions, please ask away ;)