Slow Sunday Stitching - July 6, 2025

Happy First Sunday of the month to everybody, and that means a look at the two daily projects.

June's Temperature Log specialty stitch of the month was a 'triple rice' stitch.  Ordinary rice stitch is a standard cross stitch over two threads with over one tacking stitches across each leg.  This triple rice stitch is a 6x6 cross with three tacking stitches on each leg - 3x3, 2x2, 1x1.   (For the record, you can also do double rice, which starts out with a 4x4 cross, with the tacking stitches 2x2 and 1x1.)   The was a nice, easy to memorize stitch and was placed in a very regular grid.  So, this month was very easy to do.

The overall piece to date - it's filling in nicely!   The July stitch is another Rhodes variation like May was.  But you'll see that next month.

The full coverage dragon is also making good progress.   See the changeover post (link) for all the stats and a comparison pic for the June stitching.   But if you don't want to click over, here's where she was at the end of the month.  Yes, I had to move up the fabric and you can (just barely) see the basting where the bottom of the piece will be.  

The time this week that wasn't spent boxing up the kitchen and dining room plus shopping for kitchen appliances (yeah for Independence Day sales) was spent on the Just Nan class piece "Butterflies, Blossoms and Bees".   The butterflies are taking over an hour apiece, and that's NOT including the backstitch and beads.   There are ten colors in each butterfly, not counting the beads.   And to help with the bulk of starting and stopping that many threads and also to help the silk lay perfectly, I'm actually using just one strand of the silk thread for the cross stitches and going over each stitch leg twice to give the effect of two over two.   I would rather stitch each leg two times than mess with railroading, but it does slow me down.

I'll be doing the beading at the end, since silk has a tendency to snag on everything without the complication of actual things that can catch ahold of it.   It's a long way until that point; for being as small as this piece is, there's a fair bit of complex stitching in it!  This section's specialty stitch is the Smyrna Cross - found in the butterflies' bodies.

Checking in with the SSS crew (link to current round up).