I’ve put my sensible head on for my choice of embroidery to share here every three weeks. I had two kits lined up in my mind to do once I had finished my Leafy Tree, but I realised I was ending up with too many projects in progress, and despite what some of you think about me having extra hours in the day, I still have to work occasionally and I need to make myself some new clothes! At the moment I have my Seaside quilt to embroider, my denim jackets, my blackwork sampler SAL which lasts all year, I’ve just started Faby Reilly’s Jacquie SAL and Cathy Reavy (who did the Stitchwheel Sampler) is just about to start another SAL of embroidering insects which I am very tempted with.

So I’ve decided to have Faby Reilly’s Jacquie SAL as the piece to share every three weeks. I’ve done quite a few of her SAL’s and they’re always beautiful. This time we’re making a needlecase and the colours are gorgeous, rich blues, greens and turquoise. We don’t know the theme yet but somewhere I did find the flower linked to the name Jacqueline but of course I can’t find it now!

The instructions are being released every two weeks, so it will take until end of October to finish the embroidery and then the instructions on how to make it up will be in November.

Before the first part was released earlier this week Faby had given us all a welcome pack which included the outlines of each block to stitch in advance of the start of the SAL. Of course I didn’t get round to that bit so I’m doing a bit of a catch up now. Faby suggested a Permin linen called Smokey Pearl, over the last few months I managed to buy quite a few different colours of the Permin linen either in a sale of on facebook and one of them just happened to be smokey pearl. It’s a lovely soft grey.

The little extra stitches along the outline of backstitch are ten stitch markers. Faby uses it with most of her outlines and it’s a habit worth getting into as it makes counting so much easier. I used it when making my cross-stitch books as page outlines were like 140 stitches by 90.

This first week is stitching the felt inserts and labels, I’ve managed to stitch one felt insert (there’s four altogether) and one of the labels so you get the idea of what I’m doing. The other label is cross-stitch. Despite measuring carefully my felt rectangle was a milimetre short on one length and I have only just got enough for the four squares in this lovely kingfisher blue, so I trimmed the other side slightly too so at least it looks even in the block.

It wasn’t easy getting the chain-stitch to look even, there’s a couple of wobbles! It also wasn’t easy getting the back-stitch even around the rectangle, though Faby reassures us that the ‘hand-stitched ‘ look works well with the felt – well that’s lucky, though I am tempted to try with bigger stitches and maybe redo this one 🙂

If you fancy stitching this needlecase along with me, follow the link above to Faby’s website.

This stitch-a-long is organised by Avis from Stitching by the Sea, we post our progress every three weeks, please follow the links to see how everyone has progressed with their stitching projects.

Avis, Claire, Gun, Carole, Constanze, Christina, Kathy, Margaret, Cindy, Heidi, Jackie, Sunny, Megan, Deborah, Renee, Carmela, Sharon, Daisy, Anne, AJ, Laura, Cathie, Linda, Helen