Slow Stitching Sunday 1/4/15

I plan to try something new this year.  I had viewed a recent post over at Sharon's Vrooman's Quilts blog where she showed a cross stitch project she worked on and mentioned Kathy's "Slow Sunday Stitching" link up.  I thought this sounded interesting and promptly headed over to Kathy's blog to check it out.

When I started quilting, I intended to only be a machine quilter.  However, over the years I have become more and more interested and involved with the idea of doing handwork.  I've taken online classes in hand applique and quilting and have done a few projects using both.  In the last couple of years, I've become enamored of embroidery on quilts in general and with Redwork in particular.  So one of the things I'd like to focus on for the "Slow Sunday Stitching" is that.

I have a little project that I came up with two years ago to add to a quilt I made early on that is displayed in my home.  I won't reveal the details of it just yet, but I will say that the theme of the piece works with the theme of the room.  I had traced out the designs a while ago but had never made the time to work on it until now.  Participating in the link up will give me just the push I need to schedule some time to make it happen.  It's been years, no DECADES, since I've done hand embroidery so it will take some doing to get back into the swing of things.  I didn't start on this until the evening so as you can see I didn't get too far but I'm looking forward to doing more work on it. 

There are a few hurdles to over come right now:  When I traced out the design, I used a pink quilt marking pencil which was the only thing I had close to red at the time.  However, I'm finding the marking to be a little light, particularly since I'm working on small designs.  Fortunately, I recently got two good tips for doing Redwork.  This year, I signed up for a paid membership to "The Quilt Show" website (I've had the more limited free membership for a few years now) and saw a great episode with Rosie de Leon-McCrady (#1509). 

She traces her designs with a red #01 Pigma Micron pen.  This is one of the finest points of those pens so the stitches will hide the markings.  I do have a fine point Sharpie that I might also try using to retrace the markings until I can pick up a Pigma pen.  I think the Pigma will be less likely to bleed through the backing fabric but I will test the Sharpie and see what happens.  I was also dreading pulling strands for the embroidery until I learned from her that Perle cotton can substitute for embroidery floss.  On her "Scarlet Today" website, she lists the equivalent weight of Perle that can substitute for various strands of embroidery floss (scroll down to the bottom of this page).  I like the idea of being able to work with Perle cotton because it comes on spools that I can also use in the sewing machine for machine applique, quilting or embellishment and for "big stitch" hand quilting.   

 I do have another handwork project that I hope to get to do in these sessions although I didn't get to work on it last night so hopefully that will be another post for another week!  So if you've got some hand work and would like to show what you've been up to, head on over to  Kathy's and link up your latest work!

Updated To Add:  To see where this all ended up, see this post!