I mentioned the other day that Sharon embroidered several trefoil leaves during this session. The trefoil leaves are not most stitchers’ favorite motif. They have several things going against them - they have toothed leaves, so you have to fuss with stitching the detached buttonhole across tiny spaces; they’re stitched only in plain silk - no gilt sylke twist; they have multiple colors per leaf, so you have to change the color of the reverse chain when doing the outline; and, most damning of all, they are MANY. They seem to have been the pattern maker’s way of filling spaces.

Most of the time we ask every stitcher to start the session with one trefoil, just so we can knock the number down, and it’s sort of a way of eating your vegetables before going on to the dessert of working with the gilt sylke twist. But this session, Sharon committed right away to doing several, in fact to finishing all of the full and partial trefoils on the sleeve piece she was working on. Because she was determined, she worked on two or three motifs at the same time and she found it went much more quickly than doing one complete motif before moving on. This time she’d work all the dark green on each motif, then move to all the medium green, then all the gold. We were all amazed at her progress, especially since one of the four days was shortened by weather (the museum closed at 2:00 PM Thursday due to a nasty winter storm) and another day Sharon left early because she was suffering from a cold.

Sharon topped off her week by stitching a complete cornflower - the green calyx and all the petals in two shades of blue. Whew.

Besides all that, Sharon brought a gorgeous piece of her own embroidery to share with us - a reversible sampler that she actually unframed for the trip.

Check out how many spots of color there are on that sleeve Sharon’s working. Of course there’s still a lot to be done, but the progress is visible now. After each of the first several sessions you’d look and say, oh, how nice. TWO spots of color on that big blank piece. Not anymore. And especially adding the new colors which, to answer the questions in the comments, yes will be available for purchase soon, and I’ll let you know here.

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