Monogamous Stitching

I have been stitching exclusively on the Wessex Hussif. I have somewhat of a holistic approach and jump around to different areas as the mood strikes.

This is where I am so far. That space at the top may get filled in as the original saying wasn't showing up properly with the indicated backstitches. I think a cross-stitched sentiment would look better. I may just put my initials and the date instead.

I have finished all the blue and yellow woven long-tailed chain motifs and only have 2 white ones to go. I do need to fix a couple of the diagonal running stitches as well.

Those woven long-tailed chain things initially took me between 15 and 20 minutes each to execute. By the time I had done 20 or so (of the 38 total) I had it down to about 6.5 minutes.

There are are several steps. For A, enter at the dot of 1 then go back down in the same spot, leaving a loop. come up two threads down at the dot, go through the loop and pull snugly. Go down 10 threads and up at the dot at 3, two threads lower. Then wrap the needle around the tail and back down into the hole at 3. Do this 4 times, two threads apart for 4 vertical long-tailed chains.

Now comes the woven part. Do the same procedure for B but this time, weave the horizontal tail over and under the vertical tails, then down up and around as you did in A. Do this 4 times, alternating the weaving.

Now to pull it all into the centre, come up in the centre and go under the woven threads to the top , left corner (blue figure C). Weave over and under the threads above the fabric surface all the way around the outside and pull firmly. This will scrunch all the weaving into the centre. 

Then, back at the top left, go back down into the centre. Then do this 37 more times. 

All told, even at 6.5 minutes each, I will have spent more than 247 minutes or over 4 hours on this stitch alone.

Then there were the white fly stitches in a diamond/star formation, followed by a short running stitch in yellow.

In the middle of all this I jumped down to the bottom and did the zig zag stitches over 2 threads, just for some variety.

So after all that, I have completed most of the first 6 inches of the 20" Wessex Hussif.

I was very grateful to have a very long audiobook to listen to through most of this.

To give my eyes a rest and while watching TV in the evenings, I have been knitting another pair of socks. This time they're women's socks but the yarn is very drab, can I say 'ugly'? However they will be very cozy. 

 

They're the same generic pattern as the ones I finished last week but only 68sts were cast on and, of course, they're shorter for a woman's foot. 

Never one to have 'second sock syndrome' I immediately cast on the second sock and have already knit a couple of inches on the leg.

It's tax time and we dropped our stuff off at our preparer, Joyce, last week.  I got a call from Joyce today confirming a couple of things and informing me that we can claim a couple of other things. Things such as any modifications to our home for accessibility and a percentage of a digital subscription to our newspaper. We can also claim the mileage for all the trips we took into The Big City for Skip's medical appointments and treatment last year.

I had to spend some time looking for the email with the big box store receipt for the raised toilet seats I installed last year and when trying to get a receipt for my digital newspaper subscription, I ended up having to call the paper and asking for a receipt to be emailed to me.

I also had to look back for several emails I sent friends to confirm the number of times we drove into The Big City last year and when we went in by GO train. We can claim mileage for any medical appointments beyond 40km from home. Skip's appointments were 52.6km away and we went 9 times by car and twice by GO - although I only had 1 GO receipt and one parking receipt. I was able to get all that information confirmed and off to Joyce. I'm still waiting on the digital newspaper receipt. 

Joyce reminded me of the 2022 Ontario Staycation Tax Credit and I told her I was already saving receipts.  I'm glad I got that done.

Now back to stitching.