Desperate?

Yesterday I REALLY wanted to stitch. I mean REALLY wanted to do some stitching. I had an idea, and I needed to express it. There’s got to be a catch, you say. Of course there is. When it comes to my obsession, there is always a catch!

I was at work. I had brought knitting to do on my breaks, not stitching. (Oh, the downsides of multiple obsessions!) No problem, I thought. I’ll just run up to the fabric store on my break and pick up a little piece of fabric and a couple of colors of DMC. Well, I picked up a fat quarter of quilting fabric that was exactly what I had in mind for my little experiment. But instead of getting the DMC, I decided I wanted more choice in colors and didn’t have time to stand around picking them all out, besides, I’ve got ALL the colors at home, right? And this is just an experiment anyway… So I picked up a little package of cheap embroidery floss with several different colors – a brand I’ve never heard of before.

So I’ve been stitching away on breaks yesterday and today, and I’ve come up with some ideas I really like. In fact, I like them so much that I think I want to finish them and use the fabric to cover a dance bra and maybe a belt. The catch? That cheap embroidery floss… It stitches really nicely. It’s soft and shiny. It SEEMS to be a pretty good quality. But is it? What will happen if the fabric gets folded so that some of it stays in the sunlight? Will one part of my embroidery fade? I can’t be sure.

So what am I doing today? I’m going back to the fabric store to buy ½ a yard of that fabric, and several skeins of DMC floss and I’m going to start over in the stitching department. Thank goodness it’s only herringbone and buttonhole stitch… and that I came to my senses before I did too much of it as “practice”! Besides… I needed enough fabric to make a belt, too!

Oh, you want pictures? Here’s one. I’m now already well into a “final draft” with more fabric and DMC floss – the other catch? The only way I could GET this fabric was in fat quarters. Now I am NOT a fat quarter wide, though that’s an interesting metaphor… I’m going to be piecing my belt… Wonder how THAT will work out?

And yes, I am doing some more experimenting on THIS fabric. And I’ll probably keep playing with the cheap thread so that I can see how it holds up. I don’t have high hopes for it, though.