12 Days of Christmas Giveaway - Day 12

Merry Christmas! 

Today's giveaway is a great one! An unwrapped kit of the Ann Holewll sampler at Williamburg charted by The Exemplary.  It is the DMC version on 35 count linen.   

If you are interested in this kit:

1) you have to send me an email (tricia@alum.mit.edu) with "Ann Hoewll" in the subject line.  

2) You HAVE to put your name and full address in the body of the message (I can't send it to people who don't).  

3) Then send by Midnight EST on Dec 26th

I will pick the winner and send the sampler kit after Christmas.

So I have to ask - did Santa bring you what you wanted under the Christmas tree?  Of course, if you got good health then you definitely got your first wish!  :-)  But if you are looking for something a bit more stitching related - there are several online courses that are starting up on January 1st.    

I have been working on an online course for about a year now and haven't talked about it because it was still in development and stitching progress.  But shockingly to me, enough people wanted to do it sight unseen that there are over 50 in the stitch along (people who already own a casket) and 40 in the project version of the course (those who needed a casket to do the class).  That leaves only a handful of spots left and thus I won't really be able to do a big splashy 'ta-da' here is the class and you can register for it once the piece is done.  I am reasonably sure at this point that the spots will be all claimed and started before I finish the embroidery.

The course is called "The Four Seasons Double Casket" and it is a full out, no-holds-barred stumpwork casket.  All the bells and whistles with funky threads - some that I hand make with prototype equipment in my home and will never happen again (i.e. Tricia got tired of turning the crank!).  

This is the little lamb on the top frieze of the double casket.  His curly coat is made of a couched thread called a silk coil.  This is made by spinning a silk gimp on another thread - in this case a silk perlee using a small machine my son and I made from studying a drawing of a table top gold thread spinning machine from Turkey in the 1800s.  We fabricated the machine from robot parts and designed the rest and 3-D printed it.  I have to hand crank it and it took three days to make all the cream silk coil for all the 100 kits that were made.  The silk coil is a bit uneven and that is what distinguishes it from silk wrapped purl, a more organic look and it is what makes that historic thread perfect for lambs.  I have photographed this effect on historic pieces and wanted to do it once.

It has been fun to do as I am letting my imagination go wild and tossing in things I have seen or think would have been done.  Another example of this is the use of silk gimps for gold work stitches to make really textural flowers such as the ones below:

It is about the Four Seasons with Winter and Fall on the sides and Summer and Spring on the front.  It includes a grotto and mermaid which will be a bit over the top and includes embroidery INSIDE the casket.  The silk purl flower baskets were planned to be inside the doors.  There is another inside embroidery and I won't yet reveal that secret.  :-)

I enjoyed doing the birds on the slopes a few weeks ago:

It can be hard to visualize the casket as each panel is published for the students, so I decided to put together one of my mini-caskets that you can cut out and put together.  While I can't link the pdf here, I can send it to you if you want to print it out and put together - send me an email.  But I can put the picture.  It has the partially done Fall and Winter sides in it.