Comments

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  Lucy Patrick September 21, 2020 at 8:40pm

  Hi, Rebecca,

  Glad to hear that you had trouble with those gigantic needles too. Usually I like large needles as I have large hands, but the scale of this project is so small I couldn’t imagine they thought we could work with something so large. Despite using smaller needles, I still have had to take out almost every stitch at least once. Of course, it always looks better the second time around. I found the smaller tapestry needles worked much better. I’m still not entirely satisfied with the upper pansy petals, but I felt they were adequate and I needed to move on. At least the scale of the lower petals is a little larger. I am looking forward to the gold braided plait. It looks so striking. I’m thinking of using a shorter tapestry needle for that too. The larger eye and blunter point will work better than those enormous milliners needles.

  I see you are in the whitework class. I’m in the Harmony Casket class and have the Stuart purl flowers project underway too. I thought I was prepared for the casket class because I had taken Chris Berry’s Curious Needleworks class at EGA seminar in 2017 and we did a lot of needlelace, but since then I’ve had cataract surgery and I don’t think my glasses and eyes have settled into small scale projects very well. I still want to do the casket, it’s just going to take longer than I hoped to finish.

  Have you completed all the goldwork class projects? 
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  Rebecca Brent September 21, 2020 at 12:58pm

  Hi, Lucy,

  Thanks for sending the message! I kept meaning to send one to you and getting distracted. How does that happen so often?

  I was so surprised by the size of the needles in the kit. I wound up changing to size 24s: chenille and tapestry. The #3 milliners needle stretched and broke the gold twist in the previous stitches every time I maneuvered its thick shaft between the threads of Ceylon stitch (gold pansy petals). After switching to the smaller needle I had no breaks at all. Also, I tend to work to the bitter end of each precious thread, and the length of the milliners needle gave me trouble there.

  Alison Cole answered my email about it very nicely, but she was astonished that I could use the #24 without thread damage.

  The points of view are so opposite! It’s made me very curious about the personal differences in working methods.

  I’d be interested to hear about your experiences stitching the Rose & Pansy.